The Technology Revolution

In the last chapter of An Introduction to Book History, David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery bring up some thought-provoking points about the future of the book.  To me, the most interesting aspect they talk about is “the idea of ‘revolution’ in the new media…sense that they have somehow liberated information as opposed to the book’s control and restriction of it”(121).  This is not something that has ever occurred to me as relating to the book.  In the news recently, I have seen the power of Facebook and Twitter in helping to spur revolution and political change.  Self publishing relates to this statement, but the only major success of self-publishing, Fifty Shades of Grey, is not something that seems to have been liberated.  Many publishers publish this genre so it is not something that has never been seen before that was being held back from the public.  I do think that the Internet has allowed for many more people to get their thoughts through writing out to the public.  The book mentions China— they are known for limiting Internet access to their citizens because of the change and unrest it is known to cause.  

They also bring up the issue of the public “underestimates the need for some sort of validation of information” (122).  This relates to the publisher’s role of the gatekeeper.  For novels, this role can entail fact checking and making sure thye are well-written.  This role of validation on the Internet has many different factors.  As many students know, the example of Wikipedia shows the need to check the actual truthfulness of information.  Teachers dislike Wikipedia because the information is not known to go through one of these gatekeepers and can be posted by anyone.  The Internet allows people to put on a completely different face and pretend to be someone else.  There is no way of knowing the truth of the person behind the posting.  Also, the Internet has been great in allowing many to get their voice out to the public, but this has caused an overload of feedback and writings available.  It is becoming harder and harder to determine what will be most useful for you and where to find it.    

Some Thoughts on Points in Jeff Gomez’s Print Is Dead

·      If writers can write books on computer screens, people can consume them. 

This is a point I had never thought about.  Most authors do write on their computer screens, but then they work hard with the publisher to make it look like a completely different product.  I do not like reading on screens but know that eventually I probably will without grumbling too much.  No matter the way it gets to you, reading is an experience that happens in your brain.  I do not like to read large anthologies or completed works because it distracts me from being solely focused on one book.  It shouldn’t matter as long as we can read, and if this e-book change is encouraging more to read, it is even better.     

·      Create online communities and brands built around their works that have the potential to be even more popular than the works

This change is already clearly evident with the Harry Potter series.  This series has produced a whole theme park in Florida.  It has produced food products (Bernie Botts Every Flavored Beans, Chocolate Frogs) and almost anything they can put the movie imagery on.  I’ve seen notebook, t-shirts, pens, mugs— all with the face of Harry staring out at me.  J.K. Rowling has also come out with Pottermore.  This is an online type of virtual game/experience that allows readers to read extra commentary by Rowling and allows audiences to virtually walk through Harry’s world.  Now, J.K. Rowling did miss one big point that I respect her for.  She would not allow the movie images to be printed on the cover of her books.  But even with the major success of the books alone, it is not enough in today’s reading society—readers are demanding to become even more plugged-in with the characters.  

·      How candles became an art form after electricity effectively removed them as a necessity for creating and sustaining indoor light. 

It makes sense that printed books will become a type of art form.  I think there is already a lot lost physically when translating a book into the e-book format.  The design for the book cover has a lot of impact as to whether I pick that book up or not.  The change from that printed design to a digital cover I think lessens its importance. First off, you need a colored reader to fully enjoy the cover design of a book.  By looking at the cover on an e-reader you do not get the spine and back design (I don’t think, I don’t have an e-reader).  To me, those are a big part of the book and the design theme.  Will book designers change the way they design books if they know they will never be printed?  Will it allow them to do more with a digital screen or will it cause them to lessen their quality?  

The 50% Article

I just read an article on Publisher's Weekly about the future of publishing and how e-books will effect this.  The article asked various publishers what they think will happen if e-book sales get to 50% of their revenue.  There were many common threads throughout the article that stuck out to me.
Most publishers chose to keep a positive and upbeat attitude by talking about how anything that gets more readers will be a good thing for publishing.  They reinforced that publishing's job is still foremost to find good authors and connect them to a reader audience.
Many publishers talked about getting better connected to readers and promoting their books and authors in different ways.  They need to utilize social media and focus on their digital market campaigns.  I think this will be very important for the future and will be responsible for making or breaking a book.  How will readers hear about a new book if they are not browsing bookstores or reading book reviews?  Going along with this, many publishers mentioned how the only jobs that may increase in publishing companies are the advertisement and public relations jobs.
Publishers seem excited to be able to cut costs by not using as much warehouse space leading to more efficient printing.  But because of this, they will need to hire more stuff to digitally man and housekeep their digital database of e-books.
A plus of e-books is that publishers are digitizing their backlist and out-of-print books so they are more available.      
One thing that really struck me was how one publisher said the turn over time of books being published will greatly increase.  To me, this looks like having a different best seller every week.  This may lead publishing companies to select their authors from a smaller and smaller pool.  They will choose authors who will guarantee a best seller by already having an audience or a particular genre.  I think the e-book lends itself to be more easily disposable than a printed book.  People may go through book quicker-- which is great, but they may also just be looking for the next "blockbuster" of books.  This could lead publishers to not publish for quality but the quantity of customers purchasing.

Here is the article-      


http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/50017-looking-for-the-50-solution.html

An Interview with Dave Kuhn

I was really impressed by how Dave decided to start his own publishing company because he knew people whose books he wants to publish.  He knows there is no money involved but does it for the love of reading.  I also thought it was funny how interconnected the publishing business is, the mentor he kept mentioning, craven, someone else in our class interviewed as well.  I also thought it as interesting how against self publishing he was.  But it does make some sense, he is a very small publishing company that would be easier to work with than someone in New York.  

M: Start by going through your career, like a very broad overview of how you’ve gotten to where you are.

D: Well, I always liked writing and reading but I resisted the urge to do it as a profession for a long time. I was actually a political science major as an undergrad. And then after a business career when I went to University of Arkansas, I got an MFA in creative writing. And then I taught for a while, then I quit teaching for a while and I opened a business here in Fort Worth. Then I came to TCU and got my PHD and published my dissertation. Then I decided – the department would let me edit Descant, their literary journal – and I did that for about 13 years. And in the meantime I was associate director of the writing center here on campus for 16 years, until my retirement. And um, that’s about it. When I retired I started a very small publishing company, we’re on our second book now. Our third book will be Steve Sherwood’s book, I don’t know whether you know Sherwood, but he’s the director of the writing center and he’s got a wonderful collection called Field Guide: Tales from the Contemporary West. So he’s our third book, but this is our first one and it’s just a memoir about a fellow growing up in Venezuela in the fifties and his father was an oil worker there. So I just though you might be interested in these books for several reasons. Being in a publishing and book culture class, I wanted to point out that both this book by my company and this book by Inkbrush Press, are called print on demand books, okay? And this is a real trend that even some University presses are going to, they’re real books and fairly well-edited, I think. And you know they’re for sale on Amazon and B&N and that kind of thing, but you know, they’re not stored in some warehouse and they don’t run a thousand copies at a time. We can produce hardcopy or paper copy through a company call Lighting Source. So anyway, to make a long story short, one of the important trends that is coming to be now is that more and more independent publishers, small presses, micro presses, and even University presses are going this way for financial reasons. They usually tie it in with the publishing that comes with that kind of thing. So I kind of got interested in starting one these small presses because of the fellow that runs Inkbrush press and he has published about 30-35 books already. And he is now using the same process – print on demand publishing – for Lemar University press and scholarly work. So. And a lot of University presses you see don’t have the future that TCU press does, have either folded quick or gone to this kind of process where they don’t have to spend so much money on inventory. The first thing I tell you about books and publishing culture is that it’s still business culture. It’s all about money, how much can you afford to lose basically, you know? It’s kind of a roll of the dice with the entertainment industry, you know. No telling who’s going to read it and how to market it and that kind of thing. You know as I, as the years have gone by, my initial ambitions were to publish a hardcover book with New York in kids creative writing or something, something, something. And that didn’t happen but other publishing opportunities became available to me through academic work and through, you know, my continued creative writing and just more opportunities to publish. And I don’t know if that means more readers. But another thing you might have noticed if you look at the, um, any listings of top selling books, or if you look at, I don’t know, even USA today used to run a hundred titles of book that were selling. About thirty percent of those are now not even books. They’re just pure, Amazon ecopies and a lot of them are by authors that are so established, they have huge 50, 60 thousand personal audiences already there. And so they don’t even mess with this anymore, they just go for the 99 cent ebook and do well. They skip agents, they skip publishing and at that point, really successful artists are doing that. Then there’s everybody else in the world that could publish a book like that too. So that’s sort of, it’s more of a wide open field that I’m not sure if there’s anymore people reading it, there’s just more people publishing. No shortage of writers out there. It’s really been a changing sort of world between the time I seriously considered this as a career in 1978 when it was all pretty much, you know, get you an agent to read your book, get New York to publish your book, you know. And a very small world still, though of course. But it’s just so much more loose and kind of malleable now and changing real fast. And for all I know, current trends, we won’t even have these, we’ll just be reading on these and you know it’s quite possible. Although, sometimes these are handy to have around too.

M: Do you have a Kindle or an eReader?

D: My wife has a Kindle. It’s a funny story because I gave it to her when they were pretty new a few years ago for Christmas. And right before Christmas there was an add for one and she’s an English professor too and she said, oh I can’t understand how anybody would ever want one of those. Well the minute she got it, I can’t pry it away from her now, so yeah she has a Kindle but I’m still catching that. Believe it or not I had about a hundred to read when I quit teaching, I’m still reading what I’ve got. But I do read electronically a lot in PDF files people will send me stories and book to look at, so I do a lot of that electronically but I don’t actually use a Kindle myself. I’ll probably branch out one of these days. If I could get my wife to surrender it, she’s got several books on there I ordered but I know it’s a very convenient and popular way. And I’m for anything that makes people read more, that get’s people engaged in reading. Which is kind of becoming a not so popular thing, if it ever was, I don’t know. There were always the book geeks out there, you know. But when you’re at the university it’s such a rarified world, you know? Because you’re around people reading and reading who respect learning all the time and that’s not the case once you get off campus. This is our currency, you know, these books? Its how we keep score and get promotions and tenure and those kinds of things so it depends on how many of these things they accomplish.

M: What do you think they role of the publisher is going to be in the future?

D: Well, generally speaking self-publishing is still pretty frowned upon by a lot of reviewers and critics so I think that the publisher whether it’s epublishing or print on demand publishing or whatever is still the intermediary that gives more credibility to that piece and takes it away from just being the author’s own creation, published and produced because that’s financially possible now by that person. It’s like a stamp of validity or credibility still. If someone else thinks it’s worth the time for them to design this book cover and risk not making any money. I’ve not made any money yet on my publishing endeavor but we’re only on our second book coming out soon. So, it just does give credibility to the work not to self-publish. And a lot of people do it. And if you really wanted to you could set up a company like I did and just publish it anyway and no one would ever know. But I do know that reviewers refuse to accept quite frequently self-published books and no one will hear about it except if you have a web presence and some kind of an audience and some kind of web page would help. So I’m not a real fan of self-publishing. There are so many ways around it now, too. But if you’re really trying you can get published I’m pretty sure. There’re lots of these little independent people. Especially the world of poetry by the way, which I’m pretty familiar with out of descant because we used to get 4,000 poems a year and publish about 50 of them and we awarded a total of 750 dollars in prizes for those poems every year. Same amount for fiction too. But there’re just a lot of poetry out there that has very limited readership and so the publish, print on demand method is very good for the poets and what they’ll do is they’ll get some independent press like mine or inkbrush to publish that book of poetry and they’ll make presentations at classes and colleges and such and more or less they’re just sort of traveling around with their briefcase full of their book and they’re selling them. And I think literary fiction is close to going that way too with the exception of you know you’re super stars and your really well selling authors. A lot of people I know simply carry their book around and when they do a presentation or workshop for a creative writing class they sell a few books and it’s kind of like the poet world.

M: So, with the print on demand is it just a specific software?

D: Well there are several companies that are involved in this. Now I’m going through a company called lightning source, which is owned, by a company that distributes the books called Ingram. And they’re pretty specific about how they want the books set up and laid out including a certain limit on the type of cover colors and that sort of thing. But basically what happens is, a really simplified method. We take the manuscript, usually it comes in word and we’ll turn it into a PDF file that looks exactly like this, print page. Then with a jpeg file we’ll design a cover with a certain number of characters and colors that are required by that publishing company. And then I’ll just simply upload it to them. And then you know they’ll print out a proof copy and send it to me. And what I love about this by the way is that I’m a terrible proofreader. I have a tendency to be better on other people’s writing than my own but unlike if a thousand copies of my book, Road to Roma had appeared and I had a typo on the last page and it was just there forever for a small fee, and because they’re only printing like 10 or 20 at a time depending on my order, they can fix it. So it was nice to know that damage is not irreparable. But if you’re prone to making mistakes like I am, just a sloppy reader basically, that’s really nice.  In fact, on this one here my first one, I should be better at this, when I got my first copy I noticed that Caribbean only had one b in it. And so, it was a little more expensive to change a cover than the interior but of course that couldn’t stand. But instead of here’s a thousand copies of this guy’s book with Caribbean misspelled on the back cover, for 50 bucks they just redid it. So I don’t think anybody ever got a copy with the mistake on it. Some people did get a few typos before I corrected them. That’s what I like about them, though, the ease of correcting. And of course the second edition is pretty easy too, because you’re probably not changing that much. So I like it I just don’t know about the problem of marketing is still the big problem for most people I think, and how to get exposure.  Now, in the old, old days, back when we were walking through the snow barefoot to the college, the publishing house would have a publicist and a marketing program for every book and as time has gone by and they have less and less to do with that and fewer and fewer employees now almost everybody has to do a lot of their own marketing. You know, from designing copies to sell the book to sending review copies out to organizing readings so that the marketing issue has fallen to the author and some people are better at it than others and some people take it more seriously than others too. So how to get the word out about how great your book is always a problem.

M: Right, and we talked a lot about how the book reviews are not as prominent as they used to be, and it’s all on blogging.

D: Yeah, there aren’t as many and what I’ve noticed is it’s really a kind of role the dice with your reviewers too because, you know, if you get slammed by a reviewer that’s one thing but you like to feel like the reviewer knows what he or she is talking about and sometimes the reviewers are just starting out and they’re not as really savvy as you would hope they would be. But sometimes they’re just really spot-on. And they’ll tell you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it. But no, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for review also. It’s just sort of, um, print culture world seems to be shrinking to me while the eculture world is giving us new ways to go at that audience.

M: Right, and going along that, newspapers are basically gone.

D: Yeah, and they usually run just the same old reviews they get out of NYT and they syndicate too. You don’t see very many local reviews really in the newspapers anymore. Although there are still some formats for reviews. There’s a magazine that I think our library has it in current periodicals I think called Texas Books and Review. And that’s a good one if you’re just interested in TX oriented books. It’s out of TX State Universtiy, they review everything. A lot of books out of TX A&M press, could be natural history, fiction, poetry, they’re not particular about the genre as long as it comes from TX interest. So there are some opportunities out there and there are still readers and there’s a lot more for fiction and poetry still given in TX and elsewhere to help promote the books.

M: So do you see the future of print books going to on-demand printing, as a way to compensate for

D: Yeah I think there will be more books because of on-demand printing. Now there’s still going to be your houses that run that 5,000 hard backs the first time around, very rarely but there are just more, there must be dozens of these little companies like Inkbrush and my company out there doing that and I don’t know whether it’ll keep on as strong as it’s come on in the last 5 years because I don’t know how much ereading is going to go. So nobody really knows, I don’t think and do you have a kindle, do you read on those at all?

M: No, I don’t

D: You see, I just don’t know if people are going to forever give up that hard copy for that but it’s obviously a pretty important factor in marketing. So, but I do think that on-demand print makes sense because who wants to store all those copies, you know, those remainder copies. And I still have buy copies back from the bookstores if some bookstore orders a hundred of these and they don’t sell but two they’re going to send me 98 back and get their money back. And so, hopefully nobody will do that to me but there is that problem of just capital outlay and storage and handling that hard merchandise that you don’t have in the e world. Now I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen. I suspect that in 20 years or so I’m probably going to be around if I’m lucky. But you’ll probably see more ecopy but I don’t think the paper copy’s going to go. I think you’ll still see a mixture and there will probably always be a third of the books will be real books, you know, paperback. I hope anyway. I think they have a place. A lot of people are going to be really surprised when the power goes out for a few days and they can’t charge and can’t read for a few days because I don’t have a book around it’s all on my kindle now.

M: So do you do the marketing for your own publishing company as well?

D: I usually work with the author on that. I’m only on my second author for one thing. But from my own experiences of marketing my own book I help them figure out review, targets, newspapers, internet possibilities. We have a website by the way. So yeah, I have the author… A lot of publishing companies like TCU press, even when you submit your work somewhere like TCU press or any other real press, they’re going to ask you what your marketing plans are right then and there. It’s part of the submission. And you’re going to say, this book’s going to appeal to this kind of audience and you probably will have already done the demographic on that and you’ll say, well we know that women read 70% of the book, so you’re probably going to say, hopefully aimed at this chunk of readership that is, you know, this demographic or it’s modeled after a genre that we know has an innate audience like a romance or a detective crime or historical fiction, so they’ll make an argument this is the kind of book it is, it’ll appeal to people like, literary mystery books or literary thrillers or whatever and I intend to promote it by asking these newpapers to review it and by giving lectures at these campuses or book clubs, that kind of thing.

M: So very specific?

D: Yeah, the more specific the better and especially narrowing down that potential audience. They’ll even ask you how many you think you’ll be able to sell. Before you print 500 up at first, can you sell 500? And there are actually companies that will print 500 of them up for you and if you don’t sell them you have to pay for them. So they’ll get you pretty close to self-publishing. But the marketing is so integral that a real publishing company that had money on the line, they would have already done that. I’m getting my books from people I met through editing Descant mostly. So I communicated with literary hundreds of fiction writers and poets for over a decade. And some of them have shown me books that I think are great. And I’m not even taking submissions right now from the outside world until I catch up on the 3 or 4 more that I know I want to publish and I’m still kind of beginner at this so it takes me a long time. So yeah marketing is always on the agenda.

M: Right, so you came into the publishing business knowing you had some you wanted to publish?

D: Yes, I did. That was one of the things that made me want to do it. And I set this up as a LLC, a limited liability company, which, since there’s no real money involved I’m not real sure it was worth the money. But that just means that say, some of this is non-fiction. Well what if I get sued for slander or something of that nature. It’s just kind of an insurance policy about that kind of thing. Now if there were an inadvertent copy write violation now there probably won’t be because I read every word of them and I know what’s in here and I know what they can do with copy write, down to how many words from a non-poetic source they can put in there without paying permissions. But you can never use any line from a poem or a song without getting permission. But you can use up to 200 words from a novel or a non-poetic source, for free. So my first book was an academic book on American novels set in Africa. I had to go through the whole thing before it was published and trim down any direct quotes to only 200 words per book to avoid having to get permission from the 150 people. Which can be expensive and troublesome. But anyway, just be careful. If I were ever to advise somebody to set up a micro-publishing company I would go for entities such as the LLC. Because you can get sued easily. People get mad at you easily a lot in publishing for reasons you don’t understand sometimes. Like, you reject them and their poems and they get all upset or you make a mistake and you can’t even see the mistake they said you made or just so many ways to get cross with people. And some of the folks especially, the poets can be a bit sensitive with those kinds of things.

M: And for the cover designs, do you work with someone on these or do you design it?

D: This one here was designed by the fellow that runs this company, Inkbrush. And he also did the cover for this one too. This was an original photograph and this one is a little but more involved, there was a non-copy writed picture of some river in Venezuela and grabbed it okay? And that’s basically what happened. Now these pictures on the front are from his own collections from his family. It’s a family down there. And so each one of these involves some story line. Now these pictures on the front are from his own collections, from his family. He has a family down there. So each one of these involves some story line in the book itself. And Jerry Craven, who owns inkbrush, and is really my mentor on my own company, is an excellent photographer and he took a picture of somewhere in Texas and it just seemed to fit the sense of my book and so we used it. Now of course there are independent companies that will help you with this if you want to pay money. You don’t have to do anything if you have enough money. But of course, the more you do on your own like set up the web page, design the book cover, that’s money out of pocket. And being a retired person that suits me fine I’m having a good time, but if this were, if I were crazy enough to think I’d make money at it, I’d have a professional artist do all that stuff. But I’m not that crazy.

M: What do you see as the future of libraries?

D: Well, you know, that’s a really good question. I think they’ll be around forever. I mean first of all, there are still things that haven’t been Gutenberged into the eculture yet. Somebody’s working on the Gutenberg project, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, and it’s going to take everything that’s ever been printed and put it up on the internet. Well, that’s great but the Internet is still not that old in my opinion and you can always have problems, so, I like safe deposit box for all that knowledge. And I think the world’s libraries have done a great job at kind of keeping it together and, you know, there’s no guarantee the lights will always be on and maybe that library will, you know, some library from the middle ages will just save the good stuff, I don’t know. And also, I think libraries, I mean if you look at this one, have changed so much since the old days. This library offers thousands of ebooks to you from anywhere that you are, if you have the access to this account. So they can do a lot of work, I think, moving readers and researchers into that eworld. But also it’s just a, you know, I like libraries because before we had the internet and searching, you could just walk around this place and have a good time, you know, it’s a cheap date.

M: And going along with that, for the bookstore, what do you think? Are we always going to have bookstores?

D: I don’t know, the guy the founded Barnes and Noble is going to buy it back and kick the nook out. And so, I don’t know what’s happening. Most of the independents are gone but some of the good ones like borders are gone too, so I think that’s definitely the eworld coming in and taking some of their marketing away. There will always be book stores but a lot of them might be kind of like my press, you know, sort of a micro-bookstore.

M: Right, specialty or something like that. 

Thoughts on Entrepreneurial Thinking

The most valuable thought I took away from hearing Michael speak; is that the liberal arts studies are applicable to being successful in the business world.  Michael said that when companies are looking for employees, what they are looking for are people who can think entrepreneurially.  These people are those who can create goals, evoke emotion, and use their minds to get through unexpected situations.  The most valuable people are those who can see the big picture and make the connections.  Michael said that most businesses are not started by business majors.  He talked about how the best ideas are ones that see the future by looking for what people need. Travelocity was his example.  They utilized the web as a place to buy travel tickets, but as a result, many ticket sellers lost their jobs. 

He went on to talk about how in the twenty-first century you are competing with people from all over the world because people can work from anywhere now.  This statement makes me nervous.  I am not amazing at one particular thing; I know there are many people who do better than me in school and other fields.  How can you find that specialty that you really excel at? I think there are some exceptions to this statement.  There are still jobs that require one-on-one human interaction that cannot happen over a computer.  I really liked how he described business as being the most creative thing you can do because it is the art of people.  Business is about solving people’s problems and bringing them together in new ways.  He told us to do something that we really love.  I am all for that and know that being at a job for money will not make me happy, my question is how to find that job that I love doing.    

Knowledge is Power

I believe in this statement, but think it has changed meaning throughout time.

Before the Reformation, the church had all the power because they could and had the texts (Bible) to read.  People had to rely on the church figures for their moral conscious and there was no way for them to check what the church was saying.

It was not until someone doubted this sole authority that things began to change.  Martin Luther chose to fight against the Catholic church and put power through knowledge, into the hands of the people.  He fought to translate the bible in German so more people could read it.  Why did the church fight him?  Because they knew they would lose their power source.

Today, knowledge is so accessible to us through the internet, it has become a different kind of knowledge that means power.  It has become more about how to use the knowledge and how to make meaning of knowledge that is important.  We have an information overload, we can do an internet search in seconds.  But it has become more important to realize what information you are looking for. Schools are being questioned because many things students learn, they say they can just google in seconds.  This is true, but schools should be teaching things you cannot learn on the internet- critical thinking, analyzing, and making connections.  To me, this has become even more important in this world of information overload.

Changing Role of Authorship

As I was writing my mid term paper, I realized I wanted to include more about the authors for each of my books, but ran out of room.  This got me thinking about class discussions of the way the role of the author has changed.  Lets compare Jane Austen to J.K. Rowling.
Austen died not as a well- known author.  She was actually low on money and was only known by a few as the author of her published novels.  She published anonymously because it would have been controversial for a woman to be an author and it would create a negative reputation for her and her family.  Austen dedicated one of her novels to the Prince Regent for financial support in order to keep writing.
Based on how popular Austen is today, this clearly shows how the author was viewed differently.  When did the artist become a genius?  Before this concept, authors would publish works anonymously because of embarrassment.  My how things have changed!

J.K. Rowling has become a celebrity because of her role as an author.  The public wants to know about her life, not just her work.  I think she has already become somewhat of a romanticized rags to riches story.  The classic example of her writing Harry Potter on napkins in a coffee shop shows how powerful her author role took her.  She now is (at least) a multi-millionaire who has to fight for her privacy from adoring fans.  

Foucault writes in his essay, "Author Function" about the cultural tropes that arise around an author and how that influences their work, biographical life, and expectations.

Many people see Jane Austen as living the plot lines of her novels- she was an Elizabeth Bennet who found her Mr. Darcy.  Readers directly connect her texts to her life, and most are shocked to learn she never married.  Her novels have created such a romantic notion of her life and it becomes hard to disassociate this cultural brand from the name Austen.

J.K. Rowling recently came out with a new book that is completely independent of Harry Potter.  There was much speculation about this new novel.  Her role as an author is so wrapped up in Harry Potter, it is much harder for her to branch out.  Our culture has developed this whole life of Harry around her, not only the books, but the movies and theme park as well.

Is this close association of the author to their most popular text a bad thing?  It certainly influences the way we see them and what expectations we have from them.

Author Interviews

We interviewed Dr. Hogg in the writing department of TCU.  I found her comments about the changing audience and ways to put your writing out there interesting.  She talked about writing for internet sites, and doing things like critiques of TV shows.  Because of the internet, there is so much more out there to be posted and read.  She also talked about the immediacy of the audience.  How a writer can publish on the website, and within minutes gets tons of feedback.  I'm not sure how I feel about being able to comment directly on writing.  I think there needs to be a gatekeeper, similar to readers writing in to newspapers and then the paper chooses which to publish and respond to.  I think the immediate feedback can sway some people's point of view and also take away from the writing.
I also really enjoyed hearing about Dr. Hogg's inspiration.  How she was inspired by specific, real life events.  People saying negative comments about her hometown, or seeing a concert that turned out to be somewhat pathetic.  I think that is one of the core's on writing, taking you everyday and making it into something meaningful and polished.

Dr. Hogg

M:Who or what inspires you as an author?

C:I guess I’m inspired by a lot of women writhers, so and a lot of writers of memoir and particularly place-base memoir.  So one of my favorite authors would be Mary Clareborne Blue, she writes a lot about Idaho and Montanna and living on a ranch.  Linda Hasselstrom, she’s not very well known but she lives in rural South Dakota.  There’s this whole group I studied a lot in graduate school before I wrote what became my first book, which became a lot about planes, planes women and how they wrote and stuff like that.  So I would say that inspires me quite a bit. 

M: Was it mainly in graduate school that you found this group that you really liked to study?

C:Ya, I actually grew up in Nebraska and then went to get my masters degree in Oregon State.  And when I moved there, people would say things to me like, “Well now that you’ve left Nebraska, life can begin” and they were so negative that I thought “Hey, there are good things to say.”  So I started reading all these authors, and there was this book that was really popular at the time called Dakota by Cathleen Norris, and it was getting a lot of good buzz and I read that.  Even though I didn’t agree with a lot of, some of what she said, I thought this is the kind of work.  So ya it was in grad school where I got started in that. 

M: Who or what motivates you, it sounds like that’s very much about your grad school findings.

C: Ya, sort of the defensiveness I felt that led me to other stuff , that sounds like a negative inspiration.

M: Most often, where, when, and how do you write?

C: I used to believe a lot more in rituals.  In grad school I would do things like I would have certain music or I went through a spell where I lit a candle and I had a cat who would burn its’ tail and it clearly wasn’t very effective.  So I kind of quite all those things and then my job got so busy and I started to think I couldn’t just create this sort of perfect, ideal space.  I had to find a place to work, so I don’t have certain rituals as much anymore, I do try to, I don’t necessarily write and grade and do work in the same space.  So I don’t write here in this office, I take my laptop to a coffee house because this seems more of a place where I do that other kind of work, so I try to keep in separate in that way, so I think that’s probably the biggest sense of ritual that I have now. 

M: Was it hard adjusting from moving from your rituals to having to just sit down and telling yourself you need to work?

C: A little bit, and plus I just don’t get as much writing done , which I don’t think is about the rituals, you just lost time to write. 

M: How is technology changing print culture, especially regarding authors and readers? 

C:  I think one of the things, and obviously Dr. Williams could speak more about what’s happening to publishing.  But in terms of a smaller scale, what I see is, for example, I’m teaching a class right now, Creative Nonfiction I, for students to learn about writing essays, and different types of that genre.  When I taught the class, it’s been a long time since I taught it.  When I went back and looked at how I was going to re-do the syllabus, I thought, wow, I need to have a whole new section of the syllabus that talks about online writing specifically.  And not just blogging.  One alumnus I can think of is now doing freelance blogging work, so she does things like critiques of the bachelor, in a really humorous way – she’s getting paid to do that.  So I thought it was really important to know that there are those kinds of writing opportunities.  So one of the things I look at is helping students see that there are lots of different ways now to get your work out there and what that means.  You might have to adjust your sensibilities as a writer, but also about how your sense of audience might change.  An another thing that’s really changing, another former student of mine, got an essay published in salon.com.  Which has a really wide viewership/readership and he told me, it got posted on it and the next day he said ‘I’ve already got “ you know, I can’t remember how many comments, but a lot.  And so he had this instant feedback.  You know, most authors are desperate for any kind of feedback at all, and so he had this very instant feedback.  And I thought “What a different world” you know when you send something to a literary journal, it gets published you don’t really know who’s going to see it, who’s going to read it.  So there’s an immediate sense of, not only that there is an audience, but what the audience thinks.  And some were totally misreading what he was trying to say, having these little battles in the comments.    There’s a whole different sense of things being much more immediate and present in a way.  And it disrupts that sense of a writer being solitary- which I don’t think the writer ever was in some ways, but there was that perception. 

M: When you write, who is your intended audience? 

C: Well, for my job as a professor, I’m writing some things for more scholarly audience at times.  But I have a little bit on ambivalence about that.  My first I ended up studying rural women in my hometown who were not academics or scholars.  And I wanted them to be able to read the book and also have them open it and think oh this is jargony, I don’t want to read this, this is boring.  I really try to think about potential different audiences, or potentially borader audiences.  And then when I write more creative writing, like essays or fiction, I’m thinking of you know still those little pockets of literary journals that don’t really have a big audience,  but are looking for that sort of work. 

M: How much did your manuscript change during the publishers editorial process? 

C: That’s a very good question.  It changed a lot, it had originally been my dissertation. So when I was wanting it to have a broader audience I ended up taking out some of the more jargony, theoretical stuff. And I think then, what the editor did was send it to reviewers who were more of that new, intended audience. And they wrote back and they more wanted to meet me to amp that up more. So, stories about the women, character profiles about the women, they wanted a lot more of that. And so I added a lot of that. And so I added a lot of that, um and then I think I had something originally in my dissertation that was about what this might mean in the classroom when I don’t think that really applied anymore. So I took that out. So for that book I didn’t have to do a – I mean I changed a lot – but there wasn’t a lot of back and forth. Sort of, after I made the changes after the reviewers read it, um there really wasn’t another huge, big ground to revision. And sometimes, ive done other projects where, then you go back and there’s more and then a whole-nother round and, yeah. It’s intense.

M: That does sound intense. Um, how did you find a publisher and how long did that process take?

C: I found a publisher – I got some advice from my dissertation chairs about possible places to send my dissertation when I revised it and then I sort of didn’t take their advice. They’re amazing, smart people but – because I had then sense of this somewhat broader audience in mind, I looked at a press that was more plains oriented for stuff on the Great Plains. And so, I sought the University of Nebraska Press out for that reason. And in terms of the timeline, you know, essentially I think I queried and then I sent, I think the whole manuscript I had by then, because it had been the dissertation first, and the think the review probably took a few months, I got it back,  I made those huge revisions, and that probably took me – I mean I spent a summer really devoted to it, but it had probably taken a bit longer, either sitting on my desk or doing the small things. Um, so I don’t even know if I could add up all the time it actually took. But I’d say the process back and forth was at least – probably a couple of years before it then hit the light of day.

M: Do you have a definite and specific organization and structure in mind as you begin writing? It sounds like, especially if you went from writing your dissertation you would.

C: Yeah, I did for that project. And I think it’s good for a big project like a book to have a plan. So you know, when we have graduate students writing dissertations they have to write a perspective or proposal first. But the end dissertation never even really looks like the plan. So, I think it’s good to have a plan so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed and daunted that you completely feel like you’re stumbling. But you have to have in mind that it’s a pretty flexible plan. And when I, writing something shorter, like an essay I actually don’t do a plan at all because I think that you have to be able to know that the writing and the thinking are going to sort of happen at the same time. So maybe I have an idea that I want to tell this story about x, but it has to be a,b, and c. So I think that that can maybe limit you a little bit too much. So it kind of depends on the length and the scope and stuff.

M: How would you describe your writing process? I feel like you’ve kind of answered that in bits and pieces.

C: Yeah, I guess… well let me think if there’s anything I think I can add to that. I think just the sense of now that’s more sort of obvious back and forth where there’s still that time where you’re sitting alone and writing but I try to have a writing group and give them stuff and get feedback and then revise so it’s still essentially, you know, you write, revise, go back, and you know, back when I was an undergrad and you could sometimes get by with doing the first draft and you write that for them and you do well, so who cares. And it just doesn’t really work that way.

M: We talked about rituals, do you write in multiple genres? Sounds like you do.

C: Yeah, some of them more scholarly and some of them more creative. It’s really hard for me, though to find the time to do both. So I say that I do and technically I do but I’m not getting much of the creative work done when I’m focusing on the more scholarly kind of project.

M: Right, do you feel like you really need to separate them?

C: No, I think it’s just the way – I think there are some people who can work on a ton of things at once and I think I’m just not really that way. I wish I were that way, but I’m not.

M: What was your first publication and what do you think of this now?

C: Well, my first publication was actually an essay in a literary journal and it was an essay about Davey Jones who was the Monkey. And it was about – it was really – I mean that was the topic – but what it was really about was about being a fan and what it means to be a fan and we sort of get obsessed with these things and why do we do that. So I was sort of going back and – because I ended up seeing him when I was older in concert and the difference between like, being a fan when you’re fifteen versus like going to a concert in your late twenties. So I sort of explored what all of that meant. But it started when you were asking about the structure, if I have a big plan, I thought oh there’s a really funny story about me going to concert to see him and there was hardly anybody there and I thought oh I’ll just tell that story and it ended up being about how it was kind of sad, to go there and see him in front of not a very big audience and so I thought oh there’s got to be more to this. And I thought about how obsessed I was about it when I was little, and so that became what the essay was about.

M: Besides teaching and authorship, have you had any other jobs in the writing field?

C: That is a good question and I think, no, I haven’t. I only took a year between my bachelor’s degree and graduate school. And I did surveys over the phone, so I didn’t do much. But I got very good at not taking it personally when I got hung up on.

Reader Interviews

Talking to other students about their reading habits was interesting because what they were saying most of the time did not quite add up.  The majority of people like to read but said they have no time for it.  Then when they are asked about how long they are texting, watching tv, or on the internet, the least amount of time someone told me was 30 minutes and the most was 2 hours.   Could that time spent on social media and tv be spent on reading instead?  Yes, but most people told me they were too tired to read after getting back from school or finishing schoolwork.  Does reading require more energy than facebook?  Or is it just getting away from texts that they want?  Each person I talked to said they at least spent an hour a day doing homework, but at least everyone said that at least 3 times a week they feel unprepared for class.  People kept trying to defend their answers when talking to me, as if they felt guilty about not reading more or spending too much time on social media.  I think we are in an interesting age where we (21 years olds) are the technology generation- texting, facebooking, instagramming, but we did not grow up around that until the end of middle school/ high school.  So in the back of our minds we still crave hard books and wonder if we are spending too much time online and texting instead of talking face to face.  The generation that is growing up now does not know any different.  At restaurants you see a small toddler playing on an iphone or ipad or watching a video with headphones in and not interacting with the rest of the table.  People start getting facebooks in middle school now and start getting phones earlier and earlier.  I remember growing up walking down my street ringing doorbells and asking if my friends could come outside and play, will the kids growing up now look back and remember when they had to text someone to talk to them?      

I will admit right off the bat that I am an avid print book reader.  I like holding a book in my hand and the way it looks and feels becomes part of that narrative experience.  After doing some research into the future of reading, I found numerous interesting thoughts:

The future of bookstores- In the Huffington Post, an article I read contemplates the future of the bookstore.  They predict that bookstores will survive, but will not be a place to go browse for your next read.  They think that only books deemed important enough to print will be in bookstores, only "high quality materials."  And that the light entertainment and popular genre of the time will be reserved for ebooks and not make it to print.

This prediction makes sense to me but also has me wondering who decides what the high quality books will be.  I automatically turn to the literary canon that is in place.  Our society has deemed certain books classics, and these are most often taught in schools and put on must read lists.  Ironically, these classics are usually the cheapest ebooks, if not free.  Some of these classics include- Jane Austen, To Kill a Mockingbird, Steinbeck, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and many others.

I believe all these books are valuable, but what if in this ebook revolution, we miss new classics that are unknown after a certain number of years.  Browsing on the internet for books is much different from walking down the aisles of a bookstore or library.  Many books are overlooked and have to be searched on the interest instead of sitting in front of you in print.  This future bookstore will increase the literary canon that usually does not include enough diversity.  I believe in the Classics but want to encourage people to keep an open mind as to what constitutes a worthy book and how they go about choosing their next read.