Amy Falls Down (29 page)

Who spoke of promoting sales through blogging, of virtual book launch parties, of swooping in on book club meetings via Skype and answering questions for a fee. “Readers,” she reminded them, “always want to know where we get our ideas!” She claimed that fiction writers could promote their books in much the same way as nonfiction writers do.

If Davy G hadn’t swiped her laptop, Amy would have amused herself looking up these practices. What was a virtual book launch party? She suspected that whatever it was, it would produce virtual readers and virtual sales. Amy had attended two actual book launches, both for the first novels of students, and noticed that when you get people to leave their homes and drive to a bookstore, chances are they’ll buy the book.

It was like bassets. If you take a basset out for a ride in the car, you must always buy or otherwise obtain something—a hamburger, preferably, but non-food works too. Otherwise the basset views you as an inept hunter and loses whatever respect he had for you in the first place. A virtual party is not a hunt and does not require a kill.

By the time Jazz had gotten halfway through her marketing tips, the crowd was restive, and Amy was meanly glad to see that when she wrapped up and announced, “Let the tweets begin!” the applause was perfunctory and nobody rose to ask a question. Tom Maudine stood almost immediately and told everyone, including the tweeters, to hold their questions until after all four had spoken. Doubtless he had planned to do this, but it came off as a tactful ploy. The tweets might not have begun. Belatedly, Amy wondered if she was next. “Who’s keynote?” she whispered to Davy G, just as his name was called. “Not I, evidently,” he said, rising to his feet.

He began with a series of literary anecdotes having nothing to do with “Whither Publishing” and everything to do with what it had been like to be “young and full of it and mentioned in the same breath as Mailer and Bellow, as Shaw and Yates. That’s Irwin Shaw and Richard Yates, to the likes of you. Do you read them? Do you remember them?” He slid his glasses down to the end of his nose and regarded the crowd for a half minute, silently asking
Do you remember me?
Jenny Marzen sighed theatrically, whispering, “Here we go, folks.” And how long did Jenny Marzen plan to be remembered?

Out of the corner of her mouth, Amy whispered to her. “You’re keynote, right?”

“There’s no keynote,” said Jenny.

“Well, I must be next, though.” Amy was beginning to get nervous. She really ought to think of something to say.

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Jenny. “They just forgot to give us the order.”

Well, Jazz W-B had given Amy plenty of material. Amy would be the anti-Jazz, the querulous oldster who railed against all these newfangled apps and tweets and for whom a trailer was something you were forced to watch while you waited for your movie to start. She could do this, and she could do it without directly insulting Jazz and her brainless advice. Amy had been a teacher for decades. Teachers who couldn’t simultaneously praise a precocious student while showing why everything she had just written was lousy didn’t have a calling. She could then scorn the very notion of writers having any responsibilities beyond simply writing as well as they can. She could go on and on about this subject practically in her sleep, since she’d done it before, often on the radio, so all she had to worry about was boring herself to death. She relaxed and tuned in to Davy G.

But Davy Goonan was no longer reminiscing about his young lion days. Davy Goonan was inveighing against tweets, apps, blogs, book trailers, book launches, and the very notion that writing and marketing should be accomplished by the same person. “But this is the world we live in,” he said. “This is what it’s come to.” He reached into his jacket and removed a wrinkled sheaf of paper, which he opened with a palsied hand and from which he began to read. It was a copy (Davy said “mimeograph”) of a marketing plan his agent had recently sent him. “Why, I don’t know,” he said, “as I have not written a novel in fifteen years. My agent is my agent’s granddaughter. She is not yet thirty.” The marketing plan was a bulleted list of ideas, patterned after marketing strategies for nonfiction. “‘First,’” he read, “‘identify your readers. Who are they?’” Again he regarded his audience for a long moment. The audience, who had peppered his lion tales with coughs and shuffles, went quiet. Davy put the paper back in his jacket pocket. “Let’s say you’ve written a lovely first novel about, oh, a gay young thing of about forty, who adores hideous shoes and casual sex and who wouldn’t dream of leaving the Big City, but then she falls in love with a visiting country singer from Oklahoma, you know, and against all reason she hops on to his tour bus and they light out for the territories. It’s a romantic comedy, you see, and a rollicking adventure, and a musical if they make a movie out of it, and of course they get a flat tire in the middle of the Texas desert, and she finds a Gila monster in her shoe, and so on. Well, now, if you break it down, your readers will be: desperate spinsters of a certain age, country singers, bus devotees, lizard aficionados, shoe fetishists, and what have you. This is your
demo-graphic
.” He chewed up the word and spat it out. “This is your
customer
.

“Now you do your research. How many bus devotees are out there, and where do they live? Do they blog? Do they have a union? Where do their children go to school?” A man in the audience laughed, provoking answering laughs—not titters—from the crowd. “You do the same for all the other demographics. You get it all down. This is serious business. This is the writing life.” His sarcasm was exquisite. Max would have loved Davy Goonan, who could have, without an irony klaxon, communicated all his despair and contempt to a roomful of children. “This list, you see, is the beginning of your marketing plan. But it doesn’t end there. No, no, it doesn’t.

“Think again about these readers. Who else do they like to read? Do your research again. Find celebrity novelists who write about shoes, public transportation, Oklahoma, and reptiles. Jot down their names. This is very important. This is your second list, the ‘In the tradition of…’ list.

“Finally, it’s come time for your platform. What is that, you ask? Well, are you famous as something other than a novelist? Have you walked on the moon? Are you at least plugged into a large group of people with money? Do you have access to a mailing list? Do you at least have your own website, you slacker, you
pretender
? Find your platform. If you haven’t got one, build one. You
are
a carpenter, aren’t you?

“Now you’re ready to get published. You’ve got your platform, your customers, your list of popular writers of whom you’ll remind those customers, your blog and mailing lists. All you have to do is put them all together in one beribboned package. You’re ready to market yourself. You have a brand. You’re a Keebler Elf. Your brand is Mature-Urban-Chic-Lit-Tex/Mex-Bus-Tour, and you write in the tradition of Jack Kerouac, Zane Grey, and Jenny Marzen.”

The crowd, which had been giggling happily, drew its breath at Davy’s use of Jenny Marzen’s name. This wasn’t a comedy club, and there she was, right up there in front of everybody. Amy could hear her hearty, false laughter, could see out of the corner of her eye that she was pretending to take his insult as good-natured ribbing, and Amy was torn between two reactions. First, he had been doing so well, and now he’d, as they say, shot himself in the foot, daring the crowd to turn against him, because it’s one thing to make a point, but this just wasn’t nice. Before her eyes he had risen from the great pile of obsolete geniuses and awakened the multitudes, and now he was shrinking just as quickly, staining all he had just said with the sullen green of his own resentments. She wanted him to stand his ground now, to defend himself or at least his position, but he turned from the mike and shuffled back to his seat to scattered applause. Jenny Marzen made a show of reaching out and squeezing his arm and smiling at him for a job well done. He didn’t even acknowledge her. He looked like he needed a nap.

Amy’s second reaction, which should have been her first, was that now that Davy G had stolen all her thunder she was about to face that confused crowd with absolutely nothing to say. She was rising to her feet to do this—to say nothing—when Tom Maudine announced that Jenny Marzen would be the next speaker.

Jenny got up and conferred with Maudine, both of them looking flustered. He stepped back to the mike. “Change in plans,” he said. “We’re going on a bit longer than we thought, so we’re going to have a very brief intermission. We’ll be back in ten minutes.” Jenny and Jazz exited stage right, leaving Amy and Davy G alone. “That was almost brilliant,” Amy told him.

“I was going to say ‘Zane Grey and
Henrietta Mant,
’” he said. Amy laughed. “No, I was,” said Davy, “and then I couldn’t remember her goddamn name, and I had to say somebody. I don’t know who the gal writers are nowadays.” He leaned close. “I’ve never even read this Marzen woman. I’ve never even read
about
her. It wasn’t personal, for Christ’s sake.”

Jenny returned and fiddled with her own laptop, calling up her speech. Her face was flushed. “Tom’s saving you for last,” she told Amy.

“Why?”

“Something to do with the tweets.” Davy either hiccuped or snorted. “Also, Jazz isn’t coming back.”

“What?”

“She’s got thinner skin than I do. Didn’t you notice? It’s practically blue.”

Amy realized she’d forgotten all about Jasmine White-Banerjee, whose speech, after all, had been Davy’s dartboard. If anyone should have taken offense it was she, and apparently she had. Amy would have felt sorry for her, except that it was silly to run off like that. On the other hand, Jenny Marzen, whatever her faults, was being manful about the whole thing, although she was clearly put out, probably because she had believed herself the biggest name at the table—well, she was—and so expected to be the climactic speaker. “Jenny,” said Amy. “Would you like me to talk him out of it, so we can switch? I’m sure he’s wrong about this.” It really wouldn’t matter whether she spoke next or last. She was screwed anyway.

“Nonsense,” said Jenny, touching up her lipstick. “No worries,” she said to Amy. “I just can’t believe Jazz ditched us. What a child!” She sighed. “This is exactly the kind of stunt that makes all of us look bad.” Amy guessed that by “us” she meant “women,” and she had to agree. “
We
roll with the punches!” she said in a raised voice. “Don’t we, Davy?”

“I went two rounds with Virgil Akins once,” he said.

“I have no idea who that is, Davy,” said Jenny, and Amy decided she wasn’t really so bad.

*   *   *

Ten minutes later Jenny Marzen was at the podium. True to her word, her topic was “rags to niches.” “They used to call it ‘genre,’” she began, “and now they call it ‘niche,’ and what’s interesting is that these are both French words, which we occasionally try to pronounce in the French way.” She wondered why there were no homegrown English words for the concept, and Amy wondered a little too and was sitting back for a possibly interesting speech, except that Jenny just abandoned the point and pressed on. She brought up the notion of niche as marketing tool but dropped it almost immediately, no doubt because to argue for it straight-faced would just remind her audience of the Irishman’s still-ringing sermon. Instead, she just talked about niches and how promiscuously they’d proliferated. She noted that there used to be a few: mysteries, westerns, romances, gothics, and that everything else was considered serious fiction. Now serious fiction—what they called lit-fic—was itself a niche, and all niches including lit-fic themselves had niches, and so on. Most of her speech was taken up just this way: she simply read off a list of fiction niches, making asides about each. It was an entertaining enough list. Romance had begotten First Love, Doctor-Nurse, Second Time Around (where the heroine was divorced), and so on. Among Romance’s grandchildren were Heaving Bosoms, Loins and Groins, paranormal romances, along with a huge subset of religious love stories, including Pentacostal, Sister-Wife, and Bonnet. The Bonnet novel, she had to explain, was Amish Courtship. She did the same for the genealogy of the serial killer novel, the school bus thriller, splatterpunk, steampunk, and preteen zombies.

It was entertaining enough for a while, but soon her audience began to disengage, at which point she switched attention to the lit-fic genre and its descendants. Apparently there was no such thing anymore as just a novel. Among today’s serious fiction categories were metafiction, philosophical fiction, neuro-novels, magical realism, hyperrealism, hyporealism, antinovels, and she went on and on, to no discernible point.

Amy tried to tune Jenny out and plan her speech but was overwhelmed with the sheer fall of words. God, she hated lists. And she was suddenly and utterly exhausted. She had slept on the plane, but it hadn’t been a real sleep, more of a coma, and hers had been a long and way too eventful day. She felt a bit light-headed too, probably because she hadn’t eaten anything but half a styrofoam bowl of tomato bisque. Maybe when her turn came she’d just stand up there and faint. And then, too soon, Jenny Marzen wound up her talk, and it was Amy’s turn. Davy poked her arm. “Akins was a welterweight,” he said.

*   *   *

Tom Maudine gave her a long introduction, to which Amy could not fully attend. She heard him say “Rip van Winkle” and that the American reading public was about to be hit with a wave of “brand-new stories.” Something will occur to me, she told herself as she took her place at the podium. This extremely rare coin was minted in 1949. Tom’s arm snaked around her as he placed bottled water next to the mike. When, she wondered, did we become so obsessed with hydration? Walkabout aborigines sucked moisture from the roots of trees, and they did all right. The television lights seemed brighter from here—not strong enough to overheat, but enough to blind her to the audience. I will address, she thought, not the invisible audience, not the camera’s eye, but the blinding light.

“My grandmother,” she began.