The Fruits of My Labor

I don't have a particularly big ego --- big enough to sustain me in the kind of work I do (yes, writing DOES require a certain amount of ego: We assume we've got something worth saying), but otherwise? Not so much. However. Sometimes a girl's gotta give herself some credit, and in this case a bit of back-patting is not out of place.

One of the things about which I'm proud is that, thanks to the beer book, Jack McAuliffe has been able to enjoy his place in American beer history. Yeah, sure, maybe someone else eventually would have done the same, but the fact is: I'm the one who made it possible. So: chops to me.

As a result of the book, in the past few years Jack has been awarded and honored by the beer industry, and interviewed by many people. And now we can add James Spencer to the list of those who've recorded Jack's history for posterity.

James, for those who don't know, is the guy behind Basic Brewing. Among other things, he dishes up regular podcasts about this, that, and the other re. beer (focusing on homebrewing). Back when the beer book came out, I was fortunate enough to do some ninety interviews, but the one with James was hands-down the best. (James is also one of the coolest people I know.)

So I'm happy as hell that James and Jack sat down for a chat recently. You can find the interview here. You can also go to BasicBrewing.com and find a link under the podcasts. (If you need a reference, the interview aired on May 10, 2012.) (If you want to hear James' interview with me, look in the podcasts for 2006; there are two parts, one in November, one in December.)

Enjoy.

Mapping Travel in the Rome Empire

This is so cool I can hardly stand it. Be still my historian's heart. Yes, you do need to read the bit of instruction. Yes, the tutorial is helpful. Still, this digital map of the Roman Empire and the reality of travel in it is amazing. Do we live in a great age or what??

Andy Crouch and "Local"

As I've said here before, I'm a big fan of the two Andys (McLeod and Crouch). They're both smart and both lean toward the contrarian, which is always fine by me. I've been thinking about beer more than usual lately (having not thought about it much at all for the past year because my brain was immersed in meat). I'm only slightly on top of the various moves, maneuvers, and shuffles of various industry players in the past few months. But there have been some and yes, they're worth thinking about. In this recent post, A. Crouch looks at the to-do over the Big Moves by Small Brewers and ponders the meaning of "local."

I Heart New York

Really, I do. And have done so for more than fifty years. I first fell in love with the place as a kid, reading books set in New York City. (Had I been more aware, I would have wondered: "Why the heck do so many writers set their stories in this one city?" Now I know the answer.) I first went there in 1975 and stayed for a year. And have gone back regularly ever since. I married someone who grew up there, and my younger step-daughter moved there when she was eighteen. (The older s-d opted for London. That's good, too!)

And the older I get, the more I love the place. Good people watching? Sure. But it's also the best eavesdropping on the planet. New Yorkers are such a wierd paradox: On one hand, they're the most provincial people on the planet. All of 'em. On the other hand, they're so engaged with the world around them (narrow and limited though that world might be.) They exude energy, which means, in turn, that the physical city vibrates with all that energy.

The city is different for me now because these days, I enjoy it in the company of a small child (my s-d's son, who will be four in October). I adore that kid. I'm besotted by the kid! And he's a delightful touring companion so my favorite place is now doubly, triply, quadruply delightful. (I doubt that latter adjective is a real word, but you get my drift.)

On this most recent visit, I devoted one day to business (downtown to see editor, uptown to see agent), and the rest to the city: High Line Park, which I'd not yet managed to visit, followed by a stroll through the West Village en route to pizza.

A visit to the Queens Museum of Art to see a mammoth cartographic map of the city's water system; a nearly surreal panoramic 3-D map of the city; and a small but choice exhibit of black-and-white photos taken in the 1950s; followed by a visit to the New York Aquarium and a stroll along the Coney Island boardwalk.

(I'm but an average skee ball player, although had someone handed me enough quarters, I'dve spent a whole lotta time trying to improve my game.)

And so my half-century love affair with the city continues. Yet another reason I'd love to be a hundred and fifty.

Adrift in a Pond of Lassitude

Yeah. Okay. I wanted to call it a Pond of Ennui, but that word doesn't fit. Torper would do, too. But lassitude it is. I don’t recall feeling this aimless and adrift since, well, some moment so long ago that I can’t remember when it was.

I’ve worn a track in the carpet wandering from room to room, trying to decide what to do with all my “free time.”

Not, of course, that I have any “free time.” Yes, okay, the manuscript is on my editor’s desk and I’ll see her later this week to discuss it. (Let us hope her response is not the equivalent of “What the FUCK were you thinking???? We can’t publish this crap!”)

Until that happens, I’m not inclined to work on it. I’m also not in the mood to work on it. If familiarity breeds contempt, my manuscript and I loathe each other at the moment.

Much of my house-wandering has been devoted to thinking, in a general way, about my next book. I know what I want to do, but I don’t want to get too carried away until I talk to my agent, which will also happen later this week.

(Manhattan: Trek downtown to see editor, then up to midtown to see agent.) The idea is only quarter-baked at the moment. I think it’s a good one, but ...... (Yes, this is one reason to pay an agent: he/she offers advice, assistance, reality checks.)

So --- I’m not getting much done. Which is not to say I’ve been sitting around engaging in the contemporary equivalent of eating bon bons while watching soap operas. Things I’ve done since sending manuscript to editor:

• Written the introduction. Or, more accurately, written five or six drafts of the introduction
• Read a bunch of stuff (much of it excruciatingly dull) about contemporary food politics
• Pondered my next book
• Talked to reporters about Pink Slime; written about Pink Slime
• Written a first draft of lyrics for the music video I’ll be making to promote the meat book

Hmmm. And: Ugh. Doesn’t sound like much for a month of work. So. Back to wandering.

If Publishing Is Dead, What Happens to Non-Fiction?

UPDATE: See my long, and related, comment at this post. (As in: It's in the COMMENTS, not the blog entry itself.) I rarely write about the publishing side of my life; frankly, it’s not that interesting and it’s more insider baseball than anything else and how boring is that for those who aren’t on the inside? (Bohhhh-rriiiiing.)

So indulge me. Just this once. (I’m a historian and a writer and am living through a once-in-a-millennium paradigm shift. What’s not to love??)

For those of you who don’t work in “publishing,” a bit of background: The industry consists of publishing houses, both big and small; literary agents; and writers (aka the Big Mob At the Bottom of the Totem Pole).

Until recently (like, oh, coupla years ago), writers wrote, then tried to find an agent who then sold the writer’s work to a publishing house. The agent takes a percentage of the author’s royalties, and everyone involved hoped for the best (meaning: hoped readers would want to buy the book the writer had written. Most of the time, they did not.)

“Self-publishing” --- when a writer acted as her own publishing house --- was looked on as the resort of hacks, the untalented, the losers.

No more. Now anyone can write a manuscript, create a digital version of it, upload it to Amazon or wherever, and wait for readers and their wallets to come running.

For authors, the advantages are obvious: There’s no time lag between finishing a manuscript and “publishing” it. (In contrast, assuming all goes well, my meat book will come out in about ten or eleven months.) There’s no agent to take a chunk of the profits. The writer becomes a one-woman publishing industry.

For many writers, this has become the road to riches. Authors who never earned anything on books published the old-fashioned way swear that, thanks to self-publishing, they’re raking in the dough.

The self-publishing king- and queenpins are relentless in their mockery of those of us who cling to agents and publishing houses. According to them, we traditionalists are losers of the first order. We’re world-class fools for letting agents take our money, and dumbasses for letting editors and publishing companies call the shots on our behalf.

The self-pubbers canNOT wait for the day when the entire traditional publishing complex falls into a huge hole in the ground. The self-pubbers have the funeral all planned. (If the self-pubbers spent as much time writing as they do gloating over the slow death of publishing, they could easily crank out another book or two each year.)

Okay. Fine.

But I’ve noticed: The new self-publishing king/queenpins are almost entirely novelists, meaning they write fiction rather than non-fiction. (*1)

They crank out a novel or two (or three) a YEAR. I’m sure that many of them have to do research for their books, but for MOST fiction writers (not all of them), that research is minimal and is the kind of thing that can be taken care of with good googling or a trip or two to the public library.

As a result, they don’t understand that for people like me, the “traditional” publishing industry is my only lifeline, my only means of support.

Consider: I started working on the meat book in early 2007. I finished it in early 2012. You do the math.

I spent five years researching and writing the beer book, and of that, a great deal of money and time was spent on traveling to specialized libraries. The Key West book took me two years to research and write.

How did I pay for that? By entering into a partnership with a traditional publishing house that provided financial support.

It works like this: My agent sells my book IDEA to a publishing house. The house pays an “advance”: a sum of money upfront that I can live on while I research and write the book. It’s not much money --- in fact it’s an embarrassing amount of money and I also am fortunate enough to receive financial support from my spouse.

Without that assistance, I couldn’t do what I do. Period. Again, it’s not much money, and it’s the ONLY money I earn from my books. (If I were lucky enough to write a bang ‘em up bestseller, I’d earn more than the advance, but I’m not that lucky. Er, um, not that talented a writer.)

The self-publishers, in my opinion, have a distorted view of “books” and of “publishing.” In their minds, every writer is cranking out novels that don’t require much time to research and write, and the lag time between creation and payoff is short.

So I ask them: What happens when the agents, editors, and publishing houses go away? Who will write non-fiction then?

And yes, sigh, all this ruminating led to that single simple question. I TOLD you I was long-winded.

UPDATE/OTHER LINKS: For more on non-fiction in this brave new world of books, see this post by Sarah Weinman, a long-time industry insider, and this article in the Wall Street Journal. (The latter link may evaporate.) And another update: This take from a writer who's been on both sides.

___________________________ *1: I say “almost entirely” because among the self-pubbers are a small but vocal group of non-fiction writers who, having earned beaucoup bucks from their work, are now Famous and Rich and can afford to dump their publishers and agents and publish their own work.