The Painted Darkness (9 page)

CD:
You handle a lot of the publicity and production elements for Cemetery Dance publications, and also for your own Lonely Road Books. How does your work in specialty publishing impact your writing career?

BJF:
Working on the publicity side of things really reminds me every day of how hard it can be to break through all of the noise out there in the marketplace. Cemetery Dance has a very dedicated following, which certainly helps, but we’re always looking for new ways to reach horror lovers and collectors who haven’t found us yet.

Actually, I never realized how much I would love the production side of book publishing. Other than actually writing, it’s easily my favorite part of the business and I get to play a big role in just about every book you see from Cemetery Dance these days.

Whether I’m kicking around ideas with one of our designers for the look of a new book, or I’m discussing the artwork plans with the artist, or I’m revising the sales copy with the author, I’m working with some of the most incredibly creative people in the genre. A ton of work goes into taking a manuscript and producing a beautiful Limited Edition and I think most readers assume that it’s all templates and there’s no real heavy lifting in the process, but some of our designers are extraordinarily creative and really make our books shine. Working with them is always a lot of fun.

Being the Managing Editor of Cemetery Dance magazine is a lot like working on the book production, only with even more contributors to juggle. Luckily, everyone involved is really dedicated to making every issue of the magazine the best it can be, so that makes the job a lot easier.

Probably the biggest change to the site is my byline. I started publishing short fiction in 1994 and little did I know there was already a Brian Freeman who wrote some books in the 1980s about Native Americans. And then in the late 1990s came another Brian Freeman who contributed to computer books. And then there’s also a mystery author with our name who started writing a few years ago.

Thanks to the Internet, it’s easy these days to see that someone is already using a name and add your middle initial or go with a pen name, but back when I started writing, it took a bit more research. Plus I was barely in high school and just selling stories for the fun of it. I had no idea about the marketing and brand building and everything else that goes into modern publishing. Had I know then what I know now, I would have added my middle initial to my byline right away because I’ve since realized that it isn’t cool to step on someone else’s byline. If someone else got there first, you just come up with something a little different. It’s not a big deal, but it’s good publishing etiquette.

So as of now, I’m officially using Brian James Freeman for all of my writing. This will prevent confusion and make it easy on the readers who are looking for my work and not one of the other creative people with the same name. There will still be a few works published that were already rolling before I made this decision, but most everything else can be updated to reflect the new byline.

CD:
If people haven’t read any of your previous works, what might be an easy way to sample your writing?

NORMAN PRENTISS is Associate Editor of Cemetery Dance magazine. His Bram Stoker award winning fiction has appeared in Tales from the Gorezone, Damned Nation, Postscripts, and the Shivers anthology series, and at the Horror Drive-In website. His first book,  Invisible Fences, is available as part of the Cemetery Dance Novella Series.

BESTSELLING AUTHORS SHARE THEIR THOUGHTS ON EBOOKS AND THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING

But calling it a Roundtable Discussion sounded much cooler than calling it “one question with a bunch of great authors” so here we are. And without further ado, here are their responses to that question, organized in alphabetical order:

Scott Adams*:
When you’re an author, people like to tell you when they have read your books. The number of times that happens, including email, for a particular book, generally tracks with the sales volume of the book, at least for the books for which I have sales numbers. In other words, the Dilbert book with the highest sales was The Dilbert Principle, and more people have commented to me about that book than any other Dilbert book. And so on down the line. The interesting thing is that I get more comments on God’s Debris, both in person and by email, than I get for all of the Dilbert books ever written. That’s what makes me suspect that God’s Debris could be the most widely read ebook of all time, not counting books authored by The Lord Almighty.

William Peter Blatty:
Nothing short of a Fahrenheit 451 could ever drive me to give up the tactile and auditory pleasures of turning a page. It’s just—well, cozy, and always in the background are recollections of reading by a crackling fire on a rainy day.

Ray Bradbury:
They don’t smell good. Books have two smells—a new book smell is very good, but an old book smell is even better. It smells like ancient Egyptian dust. That’s why I think the book is important.

Douglas Clegg:
The publishing business will figure out how to implant chips in the optic nerve so we can read books downloaded (by injection) directly into the eye. These optic chips will retail for $200 and each blink will turn the page.

This will lead to a new branch of the medical profession—bibliophthalmology, the science of a condition called “Book Eye.”

Eventually, when the future energy crisis hits, we’ll realize that print actually is a greener resource than the eBook. But that’s for the next generation to discover.

Lori Foster:
Ebooks are the wave of the future! Students will substitute downloaded books for weighty paper volumes, as will editors and agents who are often required to take their work home with them. The convenience of being able to set out on a vacation with ten books—all loaded into a single device VS an extra suitcase to hold your reading material—is as valuable as the “green” perspective of saving trees from the printing presses. The popularity of ebooks will continue to grow as newer generations adapt more easily to reading from a device, even as some of us continue to savor the “reading experience” of turning the pages in a bound book.

Seth Godin:
eBooks ARE the publishing business. Publishing is not about chopping down trees, it’s about selection, curation, investment and promotion.

Hand someone at Knopf a book and you can honestly say, “hey, you’re good at making this, perhaps the best in the world.”

Can you say the same thing about something that appears on a Kindle or an iPad? Not sure you can.
The future of this industry belongs to organizations that coordinate tribes of similarly minded people, connected electronically.

Jane Green:
As an author, I see ebooks as being a good thing, hopefully bringing in new readers who might not otherwise look at my work. Additionally, with the advent of social networking and the increasing attachment we have to all things electronic, it allows people to quickly and easily download my books, with a speed and ease that would not be afforded had a visit to the bookstore been necessary.

As a reader, I have to also add that nothing will replace books for me. I use my kindle for travel, and as a welcome addition, but if it’s a book I love, or want to keep, I will always buy the hardback.

Lesley Kagen:
I love the smell of book pages, the crack of the binding.  Hanging out in bookstores, bullshitting with other readers.  I’m going to miss all of that like I miss Ramblers and the Andy Devine Show and Ike.  Yet time...it gallops.  Relentlessly and without regard for who is left bereft beneath its hooves. Saddle up, kids.

Stephen King**:
E-publishing may or may not be the wave of the future; about that I care not a fiddler’s fart, believe me.  For me, going that route was simply another way of trying to keep myself fully involved in the process of writing stories. And then getting them to as many people as possible.

JA Konrath:
Ebooks will replace print. I guarantee it. Then, once print is gone, ebooks will run for office on third party tickets and win the majority of seats in Congress. By 2024, an ebook will be elected President of the United States, and will make it mandatory that all cute women between the ages of 18 and 35 wear bikinis 24/7.

Gayle Lynds:
Speaking as a former advocate of the quill pen as the most desirable writing instrument, I am bowled over by the fast growth of ebooks. For us authors, the main difference between ebooks and books is format, which means we’re still going to write stories and hope readers enjoy them whether on paper or on screen. At the same time, the skyrocketing sales of ebooks is a clarion call to the industry that there’s an exciting new game in town. I’m hoping this ultimately means more readers. The world would be a better place.

Carolyn Parkhurst:
Clearly, the growing popularity of eBooks is going to change things, but I think we’ll all adapt, in the same way that we all survived the change from records to CDs to mp3s.  But there are some things that we lose, as readers, when we move away from reading actual, paper books: the ability to flip back a few pages quickly to remind yourself who a character is; the pleasure of selecting a book from a crowded bookstore table because you like the cover art; the surreptitious glances we cast at other people riding on the subway or waiting for an airplane to see what they’re all reading.  It’s always been a quick way to make a connection with someone—”Oh, how are you liking that?   I loved his last one.”   Ever since my first novel was published, I’ve been hoping that someday I’ll see someone reading one of my books in public.  Now, it’s possible that I’ll walk past someone reading my book and never even know it.

Anne Perry:
I am not up on ebooks, but I realise it is a technical advance that has got to happen and if it makes people think and is a useful way of communicating ideas then I guess I am in favour of it; however I do not see it totally replacing the conventional book!

Jodi Picoult:
I think that we are going to see the continued rise of the eBook as publishing finally wraps its head around pleasing the consumer and providing reading material in multiple formats. Your typical eBook reader is a valued customer who wants a book NOW, and is willing to pay for it. To this end, publishers will eventually understand that price wars with Amazon, etc. which end up with the eBook being withheld and the customer being the loser are going to cost them readers. Ultimately I hope we will see book ‘packages’—where for a premium a reader can purchase one book in three formats: hard copy, audio, and eBook—which allows the reader to enjoy the experience of the book multiple ways, at multiple times of the day, depending on where he/she is and what he/ she is doing.

MJ Rose:
So the big news in publishing is there are no game changers anymore. We must bury the words. The game changer was the internet way back more than 12 years ago. Now anything and everything is possible. And anything that can happen will happen. Not all of it is good and not all of it is bad. But  one thing is for sure—no one knows what is going to happen.

Print is not going to disappear. Ebooks will proliferate. There will be way more books published than will sell well or even ever have a hope of attracting a serious readership. I think the most important word in publishing for the future is the word curators. With more than a million titles a year flooding the net and at least 30% of them showing up in stores—we need human curators to help us find what’s worth reading. We need curators to point out the gems and shine a light on the treasures.

There is no one solution. Everything is a solution. That means writers can’t jump on every bandwagon thinking this one is going to change my life. But whatever we do we have to remember one thing—the most important to me—the thing so many writers seem to shrug their shoulders about when it comes up is that  we have to work hard and take our time and learn our craft.  If we want to keep readers—not just get them once, but keep them—we have to do everything we can to write good books. And there are no short cuts to that.

Michael Marshall Smith:
I guess my take on eBooks and the future of publishing is that yes, eBooks are the future of publishing. I’ve fought it for years, as an inveterate fan of books-as-object. It also goes without saying that the physical book is a pretty extraordinary piece of technology: needs no power, can’t crash, and can be slung in the attic and picked up and used a hundred years later. It’s also impossible to upload a paper book onto a torrent site and give away free copies to thousands of your bozo freeloading mates, which is kind of an important feature for those of us who support our families through our work. The iPad has finally taken me into the foothills of consuming books on screen, however—and so I suppose that’s that. It makes me a little sad, I’ll admit, as reading is only a portion of the pleasure that comes from books—bookstores are part of it too, both the big ones and also the tiny ones filled with abstruse little works that you never knew existed, an extraordinary wealth of serendipity and chance. Online searching will never be the same experience, and so I’m glad to have been born at a time when I can both take advantage of the new technology, and enjoy the lingering pleasures of the old.

* From his essay, “Most Widely Read Ebook in the World,” originally posted on his blog on June 14, 2010, reprinted with permission of the author: