Is there a gender bias in literature? I don’t know, although there is some pretty damning evidence that something is amiss.

Tawni O’Dell wrote an essay on her experience with this subject, and her argument that there is a gender bias is convincing:

It wasn’t until many years later, … that I would feel the sting of gender bias in an area of my life where I least expected it: the publication of my first novel.

“Back Roads” was set in the coal-mining area where I grew up and was a dark, gritty portrayal of a family in crisis told entirely in the male first-person voice of 19-year-old Harley Altmyer. My publishing house was over the moon about the book, proclaiming me brilliant and tossing around phrases like “formidable talent” and “pitch-perfect prose.” The book was so good, as a matter of fact, that they thought it would be best to conceal the fact that it had been written by a woman.

I was informed over the phone one morning that Tawni was a “biker chick name” and no one would take the novel seriously if we used it.

I was stunned, not only because I had naively thought art was one area where sexism didn’t exist but because standing in my coffee-stained bathrobe in my suburban Chicago kitchen handing out juice boxes to my kids, I could hardly imagine anyone mistaking me for a biker chick.

My editor went on to inform me that they had decided to publish the book using my initials. That way they wouldn’t actually be lying and claiming I was a man but since the book was written in the male first person, everyone would assume it had been written by a man. Pretty sneaky.

Oh, it gets worse. Wait until you get to the part where she goes to a photo shoot and they ask her to get naked and pretend she is a wood nymph.

“… I heard a few gasps as I crunched barefoot through the snow, wrapped in yards of sparkling gauze, with my butt hanging out, and wondering to myself, Did John Irving ever have to do this?”

I bet not.

Read the essay here.

I enjoyed reading Dan Baum’s tweets about why he got fired from the New Yorker after working there as a staff writer (more of a contributing freelancer). He dishes how much he got paid and why he thinks they let him go from his contract. I especially liked this part:

I must say, though, the office itself is a little creepy. I didn’t work there. I live in Colorado. But I’d visit 3-4X a year.

Everybody whispers.

It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying.

Like someone’s dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it.

There’s a weird tension to the place. If you raise your voice to normal level, heads pop up from cubicles.

And from around the stacks of review copies that lie everywhere like a graveyard of writers’ aspirations.

It always seemed strange. Making it to the New Yorker is an achievement. It is vastly prestigious, of course.

And the work is truly satisfying. Imagine putting out that magazine every week!

Yet nobody at the office seems very happy. The atmosphere is vastly strained.

This is not an environment I would thrive in.

Susan Orlean has a funny little piece in the New Yorker on publishing her first book and all the editors and publishers she went through in the process. Nice to know that this happens to everyone.

I rather like SlushPile Hell, in which “a grumpy literary agent wades through query fails” by putting up short samples from bad queries. Snark is tiresome and mocking bad writing gets old, but this person isn’t overdoing it, and some of his/her comments are actually funny. Sample:

Do you ever get the feeling that we are all machines being controlled by someone or something beyond our control?

Katie Holmes, I’m just a literary agent. I can’t help you with your husband issues.

More here.

(Via Galleycat)

I enjoyed this story on NPR about Paul Harding’s novel Tinkers, which just won the Pulitzer Prize. For one thing, when Harding learned he had won, he reacted exactly as I imagine I would:

“I came as close to actually fainting as I think I ever have, because I literally just could not believe what I saw when it came up on the website,” Harding says with a laugh. “And I kept refreshing and it just kept coming up Tinkers, Tinkers, Tinkers.”

I think I do a version of that every time I get good writing news.

Anyway, first Harding couldn’t get his (Pulitzer-prize-winning) novel published and almost gave up on it. Then Bellevue Literary Press, a small independent press, decided to publish it. Book Passages, a bookstore in the Bay Area, featured it, people began to talk, word of mouth spread, and soon Harding’s book was getting reviewed in The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times. Fast forward to now: Pulitzer Prize and a deal with Random House.

It just goes to show–people may be all about nonfat milk these days, but cream still rises to the top.

(Celebrity Autobiography – Kristen Wiig reads Suzanne Somers)

Okay, celebrities are allowed to write or “write” via a ghost writer about their lives because that is in keeping with their role as public figures. But all this business of celebrities writing “novels” and self-help books and children’s books? It has got to stop.

Why? Well for one thing, it squeezes good writers out of publishing and furthers the idea that you have to be famous (i.e. have a big platform) to garner the kind of book sales that the corporate structure of most major publishing houses demand. But there’s another good reason celebrities should not write books–they suck at it.

When unqualified people write books, you end up with situations like Jennifer Love Hewitt’s new book, The Day I Shot Cupid, or Hello, My Name Is Jennifer Love Hewitt, And I’m A Love-aholic. In this book, Hewitt helps other “lova-aholics” … I’m not sure. Find true love? Learn how to love themselves? Something like that. You know, because Jennifer Love Hewitt totally has it together, which is why she broke up with her boyfriend the same week her book on love came out.

NPR has a hilarious article on Hewitt’s book by Linda Holmes titled “Ten Things I Read In Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Book That Are Not Hallucinations.” A sampling:

1. On page two of the introduction, the word “TRUTH” (in all caps, thusly) is followed by 23 exclamation points. On page three of the introduction, the word “love” is followed by five question marks. Two sentences later, the word “CUPID” is followed by two exclamation points. Three pages into the book — pages of the introduction, which comes after the preface — you’re already basically reading the late stages of an Internet message-board meltdown.

and:

4. “This is embarrassing and personal, but once a month, since I was twelve years old, I go to my favorite jewelry store and try on my dream ring.” She is 31 years old. If this is true, she has made roughly 225 trips to the jewelry store to try on engagement rings. I do not know where to go with this.

Jennifer Love Hewitt is why I find it depressing that publishers let celebrities write. She has nothing to say, she doesn’t know how to use words to express herself, and she comes off as naive at best, stupid at worst. The only reason she is writing a book is because they think her name will sell it.

Maybe I should have more of a sense of humor about this celebrity-book-writing trend, because no serious reader is going to want a book by Jennifer Love Hewitt, so what’s the harm? But there is harm. Every book with her name on it takes bookstore shelf space away from a real writer. Every end cap devoted to her book could be used to promote a good book instead. That’s dumb.

And there is another, more insidious problem here. Most major publishers are owned by the same companies that own all our music, movie, and television studios. For example, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s book was published by Hyperion Books, which in turn is a division of Disney-ABC Television Group, which is a division of The Walt Disney Company, which practically owns the whole world. Lauren Conrad recently wrote a novel for HarperCollins, which is a division of News Corporation, the world’s second-largest media conglomerate behind The Walt Disney Company. It owns Fox News, 20th Century Fox Studios, MySpace, Hulu, etc. etc. etc. You’ve heard of Rupert Murdoch? That guy’s company.

It’s not so much that these media conglomerates are trying to achieve brand synergy by publishing books (although that may be their original intention when acquiring the publishers) as that book publishing has long been the under-performing branch of these companies, and that has not gone unnoticed.

If you ask me, book publishing isn’t cut out for the corporate structure, which says that you have to do better and better every quarter or your stock prices are going to drop and your board of directors is going to be pissed. So instead of having a lot of modestly performing books with a few drops here and there but a general improvement in sales over time–which seems to me the way publishing worked in the past–now publishers have to show a profit every single quarter. Therefore, they are constantly looking for the next Twilight or The Da Vinci Code so they can get the kind of insane sales numbers that make rich white men happy.

This problem is, it’s hard to predict the next Twilight or The Da Vinci Code. No one really knows what the next trend in publishing is going to be because no one really knows what the public wants to read. (For the record, the public doesn’t know what it wants to read either.) JK Rowling was turned down by 12 publishers before she sold Harry Potter. It’s not that those publishers were stupid so much as that this is a very hard industry to place bets on. Most blockbuster books come as a complete surprise to publishing experts.

So how to fill the gap while you’re groping around in the dark for the next Twilight? Publish good writing and give the books a proper marketing push? No, noooo, you have to get that quarterly profit margin up, remember? You need books that sell, and now. So what’s a publisher to do?

Let Jennifer Love Hewitt write a book. That’s what.

Yeah maybe publishing her contributes to the dumbing down of our culture. Maybe it further glorifies the idea that packaging is more important than content. Maybe it is knowingly putting dreck into the world for the sake of a quick buck. But her name guarantees a certain number of sales, and that is the important part.

And it works. Kanye West may freely admit that he hates books while on book tour for a book that he wrote, but people will still buy his book because his name is on it. Recently Lauren Conrad did a book signing at my local bookstore and the line of teenagers who came to see her stretched three city blocks. That book was also a NYTimes best seller for I don’t know how many weeks.

I think publishers have a hard job and really, I can’t blame them for trying to serve their corporate overlords. But I also think that cashing in on celebrity culture is short-sighted and accounts for certain trends in publishing, like why independent publishers fared better in the recession compared to their corporate counterpoints. Independents are closer to the original model of publishing I mentioned before. They are a. putting out smaller books, which means it doesn’t hurt as badly if a book fails and b. they are putting out more artistically exciting books.

That last point is key. Independent presses put out the books that the big houses will no longer take a chance on (because, in part, their marketing/publishing dollars are tied up in Jennifer Love Hewitt instead), books that are interesting and complex and fun and just plain good. By doing so, independents are filling a niche in the marketplace that the big houses are starting to ignore. While the person who buys one book every three years might want a book by a celebrity, the person who buys many books a year want stories that enrich their lives, move them, and make them think. You know, good writing.

So, if your business is selling books, tell me–which customer does it make the most sense to serve?

Funny.

John Edgar Wideman—author of about two dozen books, MacArthur genius grant recipient and winner of PEN/Faulker, O. Henry and James Fennimore Cooper awards—is publishing another book. No news there … until one notices that the publisher is Lulu, the self-publishing service.

From Wideman’s statement in a Lulu press release:

“Lulu seems to represent a very live possibility as the publishing industry mutates. I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach.

“I have a very personal distaste for the blockbuster syndrome,” Wideman continued. “The blockbuster syndrome is a feature of our social landscape that has gotten out of hand. Unless you become a blockbuster, your book disappears quickly. It becomes not only publish or perish, but sell or perish.”

(Read on …)

The Brow Beat blog over at Slate looked at every poem in the New Yorker over the last few years and found that 27 percent of them were about writing poetry. How meta! Is it furtive pandering, since it’s likely that only poets read the poems in the New Yorker? (Ugh, why does criticizing the New Yorker make me feel guilty? Damn you, venerable magazine, for making me feel this way!)

I like poetry that evokes an emotional response, plays with language and challenges how I see things by showing me a unique vision. It’s possible that a poem about words and writing could do that, of course. But I think this figure, if true, points to an insular poetry editor.

To be fair, I can be a bit churlish about writers writing about writing in their fiction writing. I did, after all, throw “The Human Stain” across the room and yell “Whhhhy?” as soon as I realized someone in the book was writing a book about the characters I was reading a book about. (Criticizing Philip Roth to make a disclaimer about criticizing the New Yorker … that has to require at least a a dozen Hail Marys.)

Bonus: How to win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest

Harper’s Magazine is struggling. They are seeing drops in newsstand sales, advertisers, and subscriptions rates, among other things. That’s sad because the magazine has been around since 1850 and has published some of our most brilliant writers. So, aside from being a little dense–who has time for 10,000-word Harper’s article these days?–what is the problem here?

While mismanagement, the economy, and the overall state of publishing seem to be contributing to the issue, as Slate points out, Harper’s real problem is that it doesn’t have an online presence because it hides its content behind a paywall. Says Slate, “Because its stories are trapped behind that paywall, no one talks about them and the magazine has fallen out of the conversation.”

One has only to look at competitors like The New Yorker to see that this is true. The New Yorker offers some free content online, and people are interested. They link to the articles, they go to the website, they click on the advertising links, and they generally remember that the magazine exists. Harper’s, meanwhile, is ignored, despite the fact that it has some brilliant writing.

So the best thing Harper’s could do would be to get with the times and put free content online. That doesn’t mean that the magazine has to stop publishing in paper–clearly it has an older readership that would hate that. It does mean, however, that it should bring down at least part of the paywall so that the magazine can gain a younger readership. It may seem counter-intuitive, but that’s how Harper’s will survive. Being “part of the conversation” is how publications gain relevance, and relevance means money.

By the way, this doesn’t bode well for the New York Times’s website. The venerable newspaper is going to start charging for some of its online content. I think this is an idiotic move. You can fight it all you want, New York Times, but the fact remains: people don’t like paying to read articles on the web, and they especially don’t like it if they used to get the articles for free, but now are expected to pay for them.