Westerns and space operas

Every genre writer's dream (or at least this genre writer's dream) is to write a work that attracts readers from outside the genre, without compromising its essential genre nature.  In fact, to bring them in, to show them what the point of the genre really is, and get them to appreciate it.

I've not read enough Westerns to know whether McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is a representative Western, but it sure is a great novel.  It's pretty elemental:  men and women in rough, hard-to-survive country, hard because of the unsparing environment, and hard because of other human beings.  Some characters you have invested real feeling in get killed offhandedly, the way real people did, and do, die.  Victories are local and temporary, and savored all the more for that.  Defeats are large, and often final.  The characters are compelling, and often funny as hell.  They understand what many of us have forgotten:  our most important duty in this life is to entertain each other.

McMurtry does it without elaborate literary references, mythic structures ("mythic" in contemporary fiction means "unbelievable characters with tortured syntax"--run if you see the word used in a review), or "fine writing".

Now, McMurtry is not purely a writer of Westerns, though he is a Western writer, so it's not like he's clawing his way out of the corral.  But he's decided to play to what makes the genre appealing (particularly a stoic nobility brought out by the harshness of circumstance), commenting on it at the same time (Call, the most stoically noble of the characters, is disliked and suspected by all women, who tend to perceive too clearly what it is he had to give up to be who he is), while letting us share in the genre's inherent energy (you can see why the men respect Call, obey him, and instinctively want his approval, while understanding why someone who does not depend on his skill and authority might be less taken in--even Darth Vader eventually identifies himself to his son, and Call...well, you'll just have to read it and see what Call does with his own unacknowledged son).

Science fiction is a much bigger playground than Westerns, so it's natural that many more writers can play there and nowhere else, and have successful, productive careers.  But sometimes it's worth trying to take your ball and play somewhere else, using the skills you learned there.

That was my ambition with Brain Thief, certainly.

Brand identity is what marketing people give you when they can't give you sales

So that's why I've always spent a lot of time "branding".  I've talked positioning, I've tweaked logos, I've reconfigured web sites, I've devised suites of collateral as multifarious as the seas.  It's a lot of work, but at least when you're done you don't have anyone asking you why sales are down.

For some reason, no one thinks rebranding has anything to do with sales.

Really, of course, it should.  But it's so indirect, it's impossible to tie together.  Unlike, say, the response rate on that last mailing or the stats on the sales pages on the web site.  Nowhere to hide there.  Marketing people will chew their own arms off to get out of that particular trap.

A few months ago my company was forced to change its name and all of its branding.  The orders came from above, and were not to be argued with.  We got an absurd logo and an eye-hurting color palette.  Our press releases had so much boastful boilerplate there was no room for content.  I had to describe the offerings of our parent organization before I could kiss my wife when I got home.

Then everyone responsible disappeared.

Now what?  The new administration indicates we can escape from our current identity.  For various reasons, going back to our original identity is not in the cards.  So I'm riding the rebranding train once again.  Wish me luck.

As an author, I have it pretty easy.  I have my name, such as it is.  I have my positioning--"amusing, snarky writer of SF with pretensions of literary quality"--and my message--"buy my book!"--all pretty straightforward.

It's my day job that does the brain damage.

Always have something going for you

One secret to happiness in a writing career is anticipation.  When you get behind (and I spend most of my time behind), all you have to look forward to is a slog and a potential sale.  When you get a bit ahead, you have something coming out, you have something submitted, and your working on something else.

More productive writers have that feeling a lot of the time, but I do rarely.  Aside from the book, I have a story coming out in Asimov's, and two more out looking for a place.  Now, to really be ahead, I should have a story written for an upcoming workshop session.

We'll see.

But it's worth quite a bit of effort to get to this point, because it takes less mental energy to stay in it than it is to get to it.  The writing brain is a delicate thing, and needs some care and feeding.

This is, I think, why some other people play the lottery.  They want to always have something going for them.  There's always a chance that the numbers will come out right, and something good might happen.  All of us should try to make sure we've always got something going for us.  We deserve it.

Your day job is a real job

The most important fact for any of us who think of ourselves as writers or artists to remember is that the job people actually pay you for is real.  Your employers don't care that you're writing a novel, or a song, or making a movie, or really entertaining your Twitter followers.  Or, rather, they care, but not in the positive "we have a real artist working for us!" way you might hope they would.

They care because they think you're goofing off.  "Not doing the job you're getting paid to do" is goofing off, even if you're creating great art while doing it.  And are you actually creating great art?  Be serious now.

Having a job isn't some unique torment you alone suffer.  Poke your head up out of your cube and take a look around.  See all those other people?  They have other things they like to do too.  Maybe they play basketball, or take care of an aging parent, or cook, or play in a band.  Maybe they don't do much of anything, but whatever it is, coming in to work certainly interferes with it.

But they're all here, and they're all working (probably).  So you should be too.  Accept that you're one of us, the workers of the world.  I can't pretend it isn't sometimes bitter and painful.  But it's bitter and painful in a perfectly normal, human way.  You'll find you can accept it, achieve some success in your day career (promotions and raises go some way to making acceptance easier), and still get your own work done.

Are technothrillers science fiction?

On his temporary tor.com blog, Edward M. Lerner (more typically at SF and Nonsense) asks a question:  how does a technothriller differ from near-future SF, if at all.  Somewhere back there, I think, is the income/status issue I've been seeing a resurgence of lately--"why do they have more mainstream acceptance and why do they make so much more money?"--though, to be fair, Lerner never heads in that direction.

Just remember that, with a writer, "and how does that get me a bigger advance?" is the unspoken addendum to any question, kind of like "between the sheets" for Chinese fortune cookies.

My answer:  SF is about the transformation of order, technothrillers are about the reestablishment of order.  In an SF novel, a change, particularly a technological change, moves out into society as a whole, and transforms it.  In a technothriller, changes, even dramatic ones, are confined to the immediate area of the characters and the plot.  In an SF novel, if dinosaurs are recreated, their recreation and the technology behind it gets used in war, in labor, in abstruse spiritual transformations.  In a technothriller (Crichton's Jurassic Park books), they stay on their island.

The containment has several related favorable features, as far as a mainstream reader is concerned.  Reactions, mores, and cultural features are recognizable.  And, as a result, the writer isn't tempted to spend time and energy making up stuff (changing the way people pump gas, or giving them weird new bedroom furniture) just to show that we're in The Future.  And the writer can't hide behind the chrome, and has to focus on the engine--the plot.

Regaining a literary reputation is not for sissies

It would be easier not to lose it in the first place, of course.  To get a reputation back, you have to do everything.

But you have a full time job and other responsibilities.  You don’t have time to do everything.

So you pick a handful of high-priority projects and try to get them done.

The problem with working multiple projects is that you can always find something more interesting to do than the project you're currently working on.  That last 10 - 20 percent is tedious and unrewarding, and there is always some fresh young project sashaying by that just seems much more attractive.  This is as true at work (“another round of corporate approvals?”) as in your writing (“I can’t believe I need to edit that again”).

Within my hour a day, there is only time to focus on one thing.  So, which is it?  Revise that story?  Write a new story in time for the next workshop session?  Tackle the revision on that giant novel manuscript?  Or sit around and think up some great new concept that someday I might work on?

At some point, each of those needs to get done:  an SF writing career really does benefit from a mix of novels and short fiction.  You don’t want huge time gaps between published works, and keeping both pipelines filled is enormously difficult.

The real trick is to actually be working on something every day.  Dithering, fiddling, agonizing, and woolgathering are all time-consuming activities.  They can easily take up that hour a day.  They will, unless sternly fought back.

Despite my best efforts, they sometimes do.

Am I getting it done?  Not perfectly, but better than I used to.  I’ve dug through a stack of old and new written stories and revised several (discovering, to my dismay, that several of them had waited quite a while).  I’ve written several new stories (which, curses, must now be revised, and so have just migrated from one stack to another rather than leaving my office).  And I have a large draft of my next book, After the Victory, and an outline for revision.  I’ve put together a proposal for it, but haven’t quite dared start the major revision—this is a single-minded effort of quite a few months, and I wanted to get my story pipeline filled.

So, we'll see.  There are no large secrets, only many small ones, and maybe I've learned a few.

L. Sprague de Camp and the uses of history

Recently I was listening to Garrett Fagan's lectures on Great Battles of the Ancient World (a Teaching Company class--I recommend them highly for light education while sweating), when I learned that Assyrian methods of siege warfare entered the Greek world through encounters with Carthage, during the wars over Sicily.  A fun topic for a historical novel, I thought.

Then I did a little research and realized I had been beaten to the punch, by L. Sprague de Camp, a youthful favorite I had not thought of recently.  In his novel The Arrows of Hercules, he deals with exactly those events, through the person of an engineer in the employ of Dionysios I of Syracuse.

De Camp wrote science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and historical nonfiction.  He was one of those debonair globe-trotting polymaths that sometimes find a congenial home in genre fiction.  His historical novels are the complete opposite of bodice rippers--they are more about bodice inventors ("hey, do you think we could take that baleen stuff and use it to....?")  Like most of his books, TAH is episodic and doesn't have a strong plotline.  Like real history, this happens, and then that happens.  Sometimes there's a connection, and sometimes there isn't.

Even the characters described as passionate and impulsive are quite measured in their emotional reaction.  And de Camp's attitude is that engineers are pretty much engineers, now matter what era they turn up in.

So don't look here for a Stephen Pressfield-style description of maggoty corpses.  There is some brutal violence, but it is over quickly.  I'm not sure there's a spot in the market for de Camp's  charming, informative witnessing to interesting events, but something like it should still do.

Most historical novels where someone experiences great events or a specific culture are told from the point of view of a time traveler, even if he is not literally that.  Blackthorne in Clavell's Shogun comes easily to mind--he's described as a seventeenth century Englishman, but he's clearly from the twentieth century.  Similary TAH's Zopyrus.  In Lest Darkness Fall, one of de Camp's best books, it is explicitly a time traveler who pops into the Rome of Late Antiquity--the period I've recently been reading a lot about.  My interest in it might actually stem from that book, which made a big impression on me in my youth.

I've never written a historical novel, but I think this era, between the great era of Sparta and Athens and the advent of Alexander the Great, has some promise as a setting.

Choosing a day job

Don't quit your day job.  It's the oldest piece of advice in the writer's life plan.

And, for most of us, it's a good one.  Some writers are incredibly productive, flexible, and tolerant of pain, and can make a living from their writing alone--the best way to figure out if you can handle it is to read Kristine Katherine Rusch's excellent Freelancer's Survival Guide.

Most of us can't.  I've talked to successful writers with decades-long careers who carried credit card debt and had no money in their retirement accounts.

What I thought when I heard that was:  "Why don't you just get a job?"  But I didn't say it, because I didn't want to sound like a parent, or a non-writing friend, or just a clueless buffoon in general.  That question has certainly been asked before.

But it's still a legitimate one--and one I actually now have standing to ask.

I write slowly, with undependable quality (I throw out much more than I finish), and then edit endlessly.  As a result, my end productivity is low, and the final product eccentric and hard to sell.  And, as I know from experience, more free time translates into only marginal increases in my productivity.

So I am systemically unable to earn a living from my writing.  It took me a while to face this.  After a lot of work, thought, and planning, I have found that a disciplined few hours during the week actually generates stories and novels.  Figuring this out took some time.

And during the day I manage marketing programs, write copy, think about customers, and learn more about whatever field I'm currently pushing--right now, sophisticated financial services to investors in multifamily housing.  I work with focused, intelligent people who are completely different than me.  It's challenging, and, a lot of the time, it's fun.  And I've gotten pretty good at it, which has its own satisfaction.  It also lets me understand how people do business, something completely alien to me before.

So, don't quit your day job.  But make sure your day job isn't a miserable soul-sucking torment.

And make sure it has a good health plan.

What question does my blog answer?

I got a tip from a blog I like to read:  Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist.  I'm out of the target demographic for her new social network startup (actually, I'm pretty much out of the target demographic for any networking model likely to be successful), but I love her career advice--and her rules for blogging.  One thing she said was:  a good blog should answer a question.

I like reading blogs, and I like writing my own.  But I like being read, too.  Just posting random bits of this or that just isn't getting to what I want to say, or what anyone wants to read.  This observation of Ms. Penelope's struck me particularly (thought she has a lot of other useful advice too).  What question is my blog answering?

I once had a decent career writing science fiction.  I was relatively successful, despite an absence of awards, and really liked it.  Circumstances kept me from moving that forward, and I've slipped back to obscurity.  Now I am restarting my career.  I'm middle-aged, have a family, and have a demanding day job that takes a lot of work and attention.  I also have a decent social life, like to garden, spend a lot of time in physical pursuits (it's a beautiful fall day today and once I post this I'm on my bike), spend time with my family, and love to read.  But I'm getting my writing done, have a book coming out, and am working on, and trying to sell, my next.

How am I going to do it, when I am not really all that energetic, that organized, or that smart?  That's the question I want to answer.  I may disappear again.  I may hold on by my fingernails.  Or I may actually have some success.  I'll let you know, right here.

When will we regain our lost WordPerfect technology?

Years ago I used a word processing program called WordPerfect.  I liked it, and only switched to Word when I had to.

I established a reading list in WordPerfect, and when I transferred it to Word I realized a problem:  Word has almost no sort capability.  Excel, also, has almost no sort capability.  WordPerfect could sort by word, field, line, paragraph, and it could sort from the last word, the next to last word...whatever you wanted.  A list of names could be sorted by last name, no matter if there were middle initials, multiple middle names, whatever.

That was twenty years ago.  Until recently I would port my Word document into WordPerfect, sort it, and bring it back.  But I switched computers and lost my WordPerfect (in DOS!)  I have the same problem at work whenever I have mailing lists with full names in one field.  It's a pain to get the last names sorted.  It would seem that someone would provide the capability (short of going into a database program).  Why is this?  Certainly I'm not the only person who has various sorting needs with various lists.

I'd buy a used or old WordPerfect package, but they turn out to be ridiculously expensive.

I have to say, I find this odd.  It's as if we once had nonstick cookware, but then the company that made them went out of business, and we had to go back to using a lot of oil.

Learning the ropes of book marketing

Last week I took a course at Grub Street, a kind of writer’s club in downtown Boston, on how to promote your book.  There was an enthusiastic group of about 20 students, most of whom had a book of one sort or another coming out in the next year.  Given what I see as the demographics of literary production in general, it didn’t surprise me that only four of the students were men.  The book subjects, fiction and non-fiction, ranged all over, but certainly with a plurality about family relations.  One of other men had a superhero-related book, and there was me, with my AI-hunting suspense novel.  But no one made fun of us.  At least not while we were there.

The class was taught by the enthusiastic Jenna Blum, and I hope I learned something from her.  Through relentless hustling, she turned a poorly-selling hardcover into a best-selling paperback, though just listening to her activities was exhausting.  Relentless self-promotion is, above all, relentless.

For me, I have to balance not only the fact that I have a full-time job, but also the need to write the next book, and short fiction as well.  Several of the participants said they would devote most of their time to promoting their books.  Jenna is taking the next year to promote her second novel, traveling around the country, chasing storms (the book's subject), and managing a bewildering variety of tie-in activities.  That was all more inspiring than useful to me:  there is no way I could manage anything like that.  And if she finds this while Googling herself:  thanks, Jenna Blum!

My goal:  make sure that anyone who could reasonably be expected to enjoy a snarky AI-hunting novel with a lot of suspense knows about Brain Thief and gets a chance to give it a try, particularly those who would not usually try science fiction.  Of all my books, it’s probably the most accessible for those from outside the field.

 

The urge to nerd

The comments on my reaction to Anathem highlight my anomalous location in the science-fiction universe.  Both responses (thanks Jim Cambias and oldhousegeek!), indicate that, while they understand my position, they are sucked into Stephenson's intellectual machinery anyway.  Why was I able to resist the seductions of nerd world?

In large part, science fiction is about thought and rationality.  Victory goes, not to the most passionate, committed, or lucky, but to the smartest and most process perceiving.  A science fiction character develops by Learning How.

I always wanted to learn how. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a nerd.  This was odd then—the cultural niche didn’t have the validity it does now.

Only one problem.  Aside from not really thinking like a nerd, I’m not actually smart enough to be one, either.  And I tried, believe me.  I tried through a Masters in Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth.  I tried through a number of professional engineering positions.  I tried until I just couldn’t try any more.

That’s just crazy, a colossal waste of time.  I try to be proud of it, but it made no sense, then or now.  I should have studied Byzantine history, like Harry Turtledove, or economics.  Or gardening.

I’ve wandered off the point here.  Neil Stephenson!  Smart enough to be a nerd, even too smart to be one.  Maybe I’m just jealous.  You’d think I could think vicariously through his writing, like learning to dance from those foot diagrams that now survive only in cartoons.

But I can’t.  I don’t think that way.  That’s a problem—I write science fiction.  What do you call a science fiction writer who can’t think like a nerd, or even truly appreciate someone else who writes like a nerd?

Remaindered.

But there might be a solution.  Over the next few months maybe we can find it.  After all, my book comes out in January.  We have to figure it out before then.

 

The day job: great informational graphic on a subject you're not interested in

In my day job, I'm marketing director for a financial services firm specializing in multifamily housing.  Yesterday, my boss passed around a great graphic on property values this decade, showing that we've dropped back to the values of early 2004, and that the $2.2 trillion of properties acquired or refinanced since that point have lost value.  Four graphs, locked together in time, with crisp annotations, give you the story (though I could have used the years at the top, as well as at the bottom, to orient me).  Bravo to Real Capital Analytics for creating it.  And using it to market their expertise and services, which I can only admire.

The subject might be of interest to you or not, but I'm asking you to admire the way the information is presented.

I think good informational graphics are getting more common, with, for example, a lot of comment about the work of Megan Jaegerman, here as presented by Edward Tufte, for a long time the best-known proponent of improved informational graphics.  He has made a great living going around the country presenting his observations and recommendations.

The books are good, though not great.  He tends to be unsystematic, so you don't really learn any techniques to create your own.  People who have taken his class tend to find it unsatisfying, because there is no content that is not already in the books.  But, as pretty much a text person, I've learned a lot about what's possible, and what not to do, from him.

I'm putting a piece together to promote a new product (a green capital needs assessment for existing multifamily buildings) and am trying to work out graphics that show its benefits.  I'll let you know how I do.

My favorite writers workshop

On Tuesday night, my writers workshop was over at my house for a meeting.  Among other things, we did a story of mine, a kind of essay/narrative about the Fermi paradox.  More fun than it sounds, swear.

I've been a member of the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop for...let's just say a long time.  Most of my stories have gone through it.

I'm not particularly clubbable, so my ability to function as part of a delicate social organism like a writers workshop shows how beneficial I find it.  I've never been a big part of fandom or SF society in general, so this is my connection to other writers.

Some workshops are psychologically supportive, and help writers get confidence.  This one focuses on the work.  If you don't already have confidence ("confidence" here being only moderately correlated with "ability":  getting better makes some people more confident, but doesn't seem to do much for others) this would be the wrong place for you.  They'll rip your heart out and kindly point out that your aortic arch is a feeble cliche.

Anyway, aside from a couple of visits to Sycamore Hill (a one-week professional workshop), this is my experience of writing workshops.  Some people have gone through Clarion, and been to dozens of these things.  Still, when I do go to a science fiction convention, I'm often put on writing workshop panels.  Maybe it's because the organizers fear I have nothing else to say.  But when you do see me bloviating on one of these panels, you can relax in the comforting knowledge that I really don't have any idea of what I'm talking about.

Ken Burns to produce 18-part documentary on the history of yawning

Ken the Embalmer strikes again, this time at National Parks.  Burns has shown that he can make even something as exciting as the Civil War tedious, but has successively lowered his sites, tediumising a specific style of popular music (Jazz), and a sport that certainly doesn’t need any help being boring (Baseball). And these things went on for hours. He now turns his attention to a specific type of land-use administrative unit. The guy is...well, I can’t possibly say slowing down, but losing some kind of mojo, anyway.

Look, I like national parks. I’ve visited and stayed at plenty of them. But, aside from visiting them, hiking in them, and watching suns set over them, I have little interest in hearing about their history, learning more about the legal machinations involved in creating them, or hearing serious people tell me how inspired they are by them. And this, from a huge fan of the architect and designer Mary Coulter, and known dweller at the Zion Lodge.

Ken Burns has a gift for turning even interesting subjects into boring ones. I thought his Civil War a massive snoozefest. Elegiac violin music, pans over sepia photographs, and serious people telling me how important it all was. I’ve known it was important since being introduced to it by the Classic Comics War Between the States. I love reading about the Civil War. I have trilogies and atlases, I’ve puzzled over the ground at the Wilderness and looked up with horror at Marye’s Heights, I’ve stood beneath Martin Milmore’s Citizen Soldier (1868), at Forest Hills cemetery, with its surrounding graves of young boys, a large proportion dead on a single day, September 17, 1862 (Antietam). You want to learn about the Civil War? Start with McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, the best one-volume version, and move on from there.

Interestingly, not a single piece of movie footage exists from the Civil War. That makes watching it on TV, well, dumb. How many times can you stare into Stonewall Jackson’s eyes before you realize he moved around too much to leave many photographs behind? If there's no movie footage, and you can't interview anyone who was actually there, only a lecture-type presentation is possible.  Find the best medium to convey the information available.

Baseball did have people moving around on film, though slowly and doing pretty much the same thing in various decades, and jazz had people playing musical instruments (mostly from an era of incredibly poor sound quality). Aside from a few waterfalls, bears, and round-fendered sedans driving on newly blasted-out scenic routes, what are we going to watch in an extensive National Park documentary series?

You'll have to tell me, because I probably won't watch.

Productivity and time

Almost every site, it seems, has a bunch of aspirational statements about becoming a writer on it.  And, what do you know, in this current world, almost everyone is a writer, to a much greater extent than before.  We all have our little printing presses and share a major distribution system.  Our pamphlets litter the streets, are shoved into cracks in the wall, and are stuck to the ceiling with old butter cream frosting.

And, sure, reading productivity tips is my favorite way to waste time too.

I wrote my new novel, Brain Thief, under standard conditions of fulltime job and young kids.  This meant efficiency (not my strong suit), finding time (early mornings:  planting colonies in an unpromising wilderness), and, ahem, actually pumping out the words (speed was never my thing either).  But, guess what:  if you pound your forehead against the wall for long enough, you might knock it over.

Other writers have mentioned that the words they wrote in full spate while demonically inspired don't actually read any different than the ones they wrote with the same effort as eating a 1958 Cadillac.  This is true of me too.  I think the book reads as lightly as if written on sweaty nights at the kitchen table when not working at the envelope factory, or in a beach house on Martha's Vineyard with a trust fund.  Doesn't really matter.

But, if I suddenly had more time, I think I would give up on the crisp efficiency of my mornings and weekends, and waste more time rather than produce much more.  Of course, that makes me sad, but leisure has its value too.  Time used in reading or bicycling beats time wasted in the office any day.

Not many tips here!  Maybe this:  writing is fun, but it's still a job.  Treat it like one.

Steps toward a career reboot

Some years ago, I was somebody.  Not much of somebody, to be sure.  No awards, no fame, but a steady succession of novels, and a number of short stories.

It didn't take me much to fall off the wagon.  Two kids, a fulltime job, irritation at the fact that, after all that work, I wasn't much of somebody.

But there isn't much else for me to do, so I've been back at it again.  My novel is coming out next year, and I've been sending stories out again.  It's not the most sensible course of action in the world, but it's what I've got.

So that's what this is all about.  I'm going for it.  Wish me luck.

The writer's garden

I don't know if writers garden, on average, more often than other people of equivalent age and social class.  Writers are too various for some kind of analysis.

The most prominent gardening writer I know is my friend James Patrick Kelly.  He used to live in Portsmouth, where he had a big suburban garden.  Now he lives on Lake Pawtuckaway, where he has a sprawling estate with shady areas, waterside plantings, and a croquet pitch.  There don't seem to be any pictures of his work on his site, which, oddly, is focused on his writing.

I don't write as much, or as well, as Jim, so I will have fill things out a bit.  But my yard, like my oevre, is a bit smaller--actually, 40 feet square, crammed between several concrete block garages.  I've done my best.

Here rudbeckia, phlox, and liatris near my garage.  You can see that I don't favor a crisply organized look.  Sun is hitting the rudbeckia, which makes them glow.

This is along the garage in the other direction, a few weeks earlier.  Daylilies, Russian sage, butterfly bush, cranesbill.  All easy to grow and with satisfying results.

Most weekends I must write, or drown.  But when I can, I work in the garden.  I have the front and side to do yet--they make the house look abandoned, or lived in by a more traditional type of alcoholic writer.

The cover of Brain Thief

I’ve always been irritated by writers who post the covers of their upcoming books with remarks about how much they like their covers.

So I should probably feel more embarrassed about posting the cover design for my upcoming book and telling you how much I like it than I am.

But I will disguise it as a bit of an essay on cover semiotics, and also as a marketing pitch: I’m showing you this so when you spot Brain Thief out of the corner of your eye at a bookstore, you will forget whatever else you were there to buy and grab it immediately. I understand why you might even want to shove people out of the way, but please refrain. Jablokov fans are goal-oriented, but laid back about it. Looked at this way, showing you the cover now is just a public service!

A cover is an ad for the book. Its goal is to get you to come over and pick it up. Once you’ve picked it up, its job is done, though it might well have post-purchase signifier work to do (“I am the kind of person who reads books like this!”), signifier work that, as has been much discussed, the Kindle will not perform for you.

But, key to this, the cover should accurately signal what kind of book it is, so that the right person picks it up. Time and attention are scarce resources. It is the responsibility of everyone presenting the book, from author to bookstore, to use these resources wisely.

You’re looking over the New Book area. Some books strike you as books you'd like, others not.  All sorts of things go into that decision:  title font, subject matter, the style of the illustration, whether it has people in it, etc.  You reach out...and pick one up.  You glance at it and use your second order analysis--blurbs, reading the first page, reading page 117, whatever.  But if that analysis reveals that this is completely the wrong book for you, then the cover has sent you the wrong signal and wasted its efforts.  If it sent you the wrong signal, it's sending the wrong signal to people who would like it, and they don't pick it up, an even greater loss.

Making these choices isn't easy.  This cover, for example, is making some claims, about style, about mood, about quality.  The book is suspenseful, full of cool stuff, and somewhat creepy.  It's also funny, but that's hard to convey when the book isn't actually a comic novel.  The somewhat pulpy suggestion I made for the cover would have conveyed the humor, but missed the other important information.  So, yes, I do like the cover!