Yes. Hilarious. True.

For years as a fiction writer, I have felt pressured to write creative nonfiction, even though I’m not that into the genre and don’t really like talking about myself. But everyone was making such a big deal out of the memoir that I felt it was something I should be doing. There was something going on in the culture where the idea of something being literally true (as opposed to metaphorically true, which is what you see in fiction) made it more worth reading.

Of course, James Frey and Herman Rosenblat show that truth and the memoir can be a very fuzzy thing. Maybe that’s part of why nonfiction sales are dropping while fiction is rising. “Sales of this year’s top 10 non-fiction books in October were down 52% year on year, while sales of hardback fiction titles have soared by 90%,” says Bookseller.com.

Finally, a trend in publishing that I like.

So Publishers Weekly put out a list of the top 10 books for 2009 and didn’t include any women writers on it. Everyone is in an uproar, at least according to some sources.

As I have written before on here, I am torn about this issue. I don’t want women to get special treatment, and yet lists like these clearly show that there is a bias against women writers in the publishing industry. And since gender has nothing to do with whether writing is good or bad, it suggests that the people who control these lists either ignore anything written by a woman or they don’t like the subjects women tend to write about.

Troublesome indeed. Still, in this case, I just can’t bring myself to care that much. Why? Well, it’s Publishers Weekly.

Here’s James Ellroy talking about writing. To him, publishing is a matter of extreme persistence. It’s interesting to hear what he got paid for his early novels. (Via GalleyCat)

First Amish Romance, now angels. Publishers Weekly says that this fall, publishers are introducing more than a dozen titles about angels:

… good ones, funny ones and especially fallen ones, kicked out of heaven. “We’ve kind of exhausted where we can go with vampires,” said Heather Doss, children’s merchandise manager for Bookazine. “Now we’re taking the safe characters and making them the bad guys. We’re turning that stereotypical angel image upside down.”

Sounds like the books range from your typical guardian angel story to comedic stories about angels to the angel-as-romantic-lead. Apparently, angels, especially the fallen kind, “are the new hotties. Like modern vampires, they can be gorgeous, immortal and otherworldly heartthrobs, unlike, say, zombies.”

I don’t know about this last idea. First of all, fallen angels are demons, according to the Bible, so it’s kind of weird they are playing with angels and ignoring that part of their make-up. Secondly, unlike vampires, a lot of people sincerely believe in angels and see them as religious icons, so this idea could backfire on publishers.

On the other hand, remember that TV show where that Irish lady was an angel? And there was a black lady who was also an angel? And for some reason they both helped people, maybe because they were friends? It was on the Family Channel or something. Anyway, people seemed to really like it, so maybe this trend will be like that.

As part of its quest to be involved in absolutely everything in my entire life, Google is going to provide on-demand printing of books the company has already scanned and made available online. The way it will work is that stores and libraries will have high-speed printing and binding machines that charge people about $8 to print out a public domain, out-of-print book from Google’s collection. The machine can print a 300 page book in under five minutes. Part of the money goes to Google and part of it goes to OnDemand, the maker of the Espresso printing machine. And the rest ($3) goes to the bookstore or library hosting the machine.

There’s been a lot of hubbub in the publishing industry–and the courts–about Google’s digital library and the copyright and royalties problems. So this printing project only includes books with expired copyrights that are no longer in print. However, I’d guess that if it takes off it will soon include authors who opt in to have their works included. This takes it from Google providing information online for free to the company making a profit from it.

I really am quite annoyed that Google has to mark its territory on anything it considers information. It’s creepy. It may very well be the basis of several sci-fi novels already in the works. Think technological singularity, dystopic future, lots of shiny chrome … the usual stuff. (Read on …)

You know, it’s all well and good that this guy can teach me how to write a novel in 7 minutes a day. I buy his guarantees that he can help me “monetize” my work so that my “inbox is overflowing with an avalanche of success.”

However.

Seven minutes? Seven whole minutes?

A day?

Wow. That’s a commitment. I’m pretty busy, you know. I mean, let’s face it, I couldn’t spare the 7 minutes a day it takes to get a flat stomach or read the Bible or clean my bathroom, so what makes him think I have 7 minutes a day to spend writing and publishing a best-selling novel?

Nope, he’s going to have to do better than that.

I want a pill.

Here’s how it would work: I would take it and it would write the book for me. I wouldn’t even have to know what it’s about. When it is done, I would just take my novel and cash it in for millions of dollars and fame. Just like Dan Brown.

So let’s get going on that, Author 101 University. (Via Mediabistro)

Who knew? A new trend in publishing is Amish romances. They are, according to The Wall Street Journal, G-rated romances about Amish women, also called bonnet books.

The trend was started by novelist Cindy Woodsmall, who is not Amish herself but has done a lot of research into the culture/religion. Her first book When the Heart Cries “revolves around Hannah, a young Amish woman who falls in love with a Mennonite and hides her plans to marry him from her strict parents. The lovers struggle to overcome the cultural divide, and actually kiss a couple of times in 326 pages:

‘His warm, gentle lips moved over hers, and she returned the favor, until Hannah thought they might both take flight right then and there. Finally desperate for air, they parted.’”

These books are selling like hot-cakes to Amish and non-Amish alike, so much so that publishers are expanding looking into Amish thrillers and murder mysteries. Publishers “attribute the books’ popularity to their pastoral settings and forbidden love scenarios à la Romeo and Juliet.”

This is a cute fad. I like it much better than books about falling in love with a sparkly vampire.

Apparently, the New York Times is all about writing about writing lately. Hurray for us! The Sunday Book Review will have a piece that plays with the idea of a “bailout for writers.” I promise to find something uplifting for the next post. In the mean time …. topical!

… overcapacity of farms and farm produce was driving down crop prices, and that elimination of that over­capacity was needed.

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. …

So how would my big St. Bernard of a bailout dig the publishers out of their drifts? According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let’s say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.

Of course, this is all theoretical and satirical and junk.

However, I took the real-life version of a writer bailout for a year; I worked in advertising. And now I don’t. So I guess bailouts are only for the greedy or the stupid. Burn! Take that, insurance, airlines, auto, banking …..

Upon hearing that “Joe the Plumber” has a book deal, Timothy Egan writes a rant that I think a lot of us would second.

There was a time when I wanted to be like Sting, the singer, belting out, “Roxanne …” I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.

Egan also hopes that having a writer in the White House will improve things. Man, Obama’s just doling out hope left and right … or maybe just left.

-marcia

PS - So … Shouldn’t it be “If only there were such a thing …?” Why do I ask? Yes, it should. Ugh, sometimes I hate that I used to copy edit for a living.