Alan Cheuse's Blog, page 4

I've published more than twenty books; more than half of these were either novels or short story collections. I have never left behind the necessary feeling that each new book will be the best, and that each new book feels as though it were the first. Even so, I have never felt as confused and at the same full of expectation as I have with my latest, the novel Prayers for the Living.
The current situation for a writer appears quite distinct from any other moment since the birth of modern publishing in the early nineteenth century. There's no singular classic chain of expertise that links publisher to book sellers to audience. That line of distribution still exists, but so do a number of others. The link between writer and reader has morphed into a rapidly changing field of play.
Taking a book to market has become as complicated and problematic as the writing of the book itself. First, I have had to recognize the importance of social media that I had held before now to be rather trivial and extraneous to anything serious in the culture. I have learned how to uses Twitter to spread the news among fans, friends, and family about my book and public appearances and engage readers in conversation. I have used Facebook to post updates about the publishing process. I have emailed friends and family, urging them to preorder the book. I have blogged for free, for a website I seldom used to visit, in hopes of getting my name in front of the right people, the good readers of the world.
All of this to juice the Amazon algorithm, so that when my book is on sale, it will be placed in front of a few more eyeballs. The more eyeballs, the more books Amazon will order from the publisher.
The alternative is to wait passively for good reviews, fewer coming each year, and then wait for orders to come in and for Amazon, if the preorder number isn’t high enough, to back order books, which can take a week to ten days. (I know first-hand the difficulty of a new book getting a review from my work as a reviewer for the past five decades. We live in a time when many more good books are published than get the serious attention they deserve. As fewer and fewer reviews appear in newspapers and magazines more and more come out on line. But for the ordinary reader—let’s call her the civilian reader—most of the internet reviews never cross her horizon. )
In the current constantly shifting and changing business of contemporary publishing even many established writers feel slightly bewildered. Some disdain the new technologies of communication and commerce. Others delve into them half-heartedly, like tourists or travelers in unknown territory, without a guide.
Some of us are trying, with help from publishers and publicists, to learn how to move forward in this brave new world. But every day there seems to be someone else who appears to have harnessed this ability to promote, for sale, of course. It takes as much work to promote a book as to write one, is what it feels like, as much work just to get a new book in this range of certainty as it does to have put in the years to compose it.

In honor of what I hope will be the last snow of winter in DC...

Richard Wilbur, "First Snow in Alsace"
The snow came down last night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,
Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.

As if it did not know they'd changed,
Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes
Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged.

The ration stacks are milky domes;
Across the ammunition pile
The snow has climbed in sparkling combs.

You think: beyond the town a mile
Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes
Of soldiers dead a little while.

Persons and persons in disguise,
Walking the new air white and fine,
Trade glances quick with shared surprise.

At children's windows, heaped, benign,
As always, winter shines the most,
And frost makes marvelous designs.

The night guard coming from his post,
Ten first-snows back in thought, walks slow
And warms him with a boyish boast:

He was the first to see the snow.

McGuane's third story collection, Crow Fair, just out, beautifully made and soul-stretching stories about a multitude of Montana characters...Western figures on a big stage with problems not unlike all of our own...

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/05/3889550...

Traveling the DC-NYC rail line, a few hours out of time, good for reading, looking out at the houses in the towns that we rush through, some places I have only visited, Baltimore, Philadelphia, other places where I've lived,New Brunswick,New Jersey, Rahway, Elizabeth (my maternal grandparents owned a shop there), and all the miles of houses, the tens of thousands of people living their lives within, do they read? what do they read? mostly best-sellers? or some reread the books they enjoyed at college or books they are studying now, and what part of the night do they give over to reading? or is it mostly television, the cable series that have become our new soap operas? the news, the news, the news? Ezra Pound writes "Poetry is news that stays news..."
Why read? To know other places, other minds, to travel at greater velocity than currently possible, to traverse an ancient glacier on snow shoes, to fly beyond the asteroid belt, to soar into the heart of the cosmos, before falling back into the comfort of seemingly immortal moments strung together leading to an unknown end... Why read? Why not? Why must? Why should? Stories, poems, novels, everything and nothing...and everything again...

Launching my new book, Prayers for the Living, in the social media universe, quite a different way of proceeding as opposed to the old days...
Some small part of me can't help but think it's immodest, to shout, and whisper, and declaim, about the new book...but apparently the quietest voices don't get heard at all. So shedding my
embarrassment and saying to whomever is listening, please do click on the address below and boldly preorder Prayers for the Living.
I thank you for that.

https://twitter.com/FigTreeBks/status...

of a novel. Some days to settle down in, without the absolute necessity of making new pages. The mind settles. Outside, snow falling. In my mind, small patterns drift and slowly swirl. Between drafts I often write a story or two. These small bits, some visual, some aural, may be the beginning of something small...

Good questions make for a good interview.

An interview in the Foreward Newsletter
about the making of Prayers for the Living.

http://clicks.skem1.com/preview/?c=37...

Some good words about some new and old books, some of mine included, in this column by West Coast writer Rick Kleffel at the KQED web page...

http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2015/02/17/m...

A lovely novel out of Canada--by Helen Humphreys--about a downed RAF flier and the aftermath of his imprisonment in a German POW camp in France, beginning with the effect on his new young bride back in England.

http://www.npr.org/2015/02/16/3867588...

Philip Levine, dead at 87, in Fresno, where he spent a large portion of his teaching and writing life. He never left behind his childhood in Detroit, making harsh lyric out of the grease and muscle of a life in the guts of industry.
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And still alive! Jane Hirshfield, with her new book of intense and intelligent essays on the life of poetry--Ten Windows.
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RIP--Que Viva!
Life's beautiful if sometimes nearly unbearable rhythms....