2017
May April February2016
June May2015
October September June April March2014
August JulySEE ALL ARCHIVES
January 05, 2006
The Penultimate Night of the Year
My wife says I use “penultimate” as though people understand it. I tell her it’s just more efficient.
She and the rest of my family went out shopping again this afternoon, and so I had some time to focus on the manuscript that’s been chiding me for a few weeks — a story collection from an agent we haven’t worked with yet but an author I’ve read before. I read the first story and it made me sad. That’s good. Emotion is good. But it’s still the holidays, I thought, and then I put it down for awhile.
After all, there were emails to deal with.
That’s how my manuscript backlog gets so thick.
But process is always pressing. There were production questions about the Song of the Crow bookmark. I love that cover. And questions about the next postcard mailing. I had to turn around the author proofs for Mohr and to check the duotones in that novel. It’s beautiful, really. And brilliant, which buoys me. I believe that expecting something of readers is a good thing . . . .
Watch what can happen when you do, I say.
There are endless examples, I say.
We’re dedicated to careers — we say that all the time, too. But we select books, books that we’re proud to put the company name on. They should all be face out. Especially given the support we give them once they’re out there. That’s necessary in the world of 25,000 novels a year. (Is that the current number?)
I give you the just completed Bad Tuxedo Book and Music Tour for Timothy Schaffert. Makes me laugh just saying it. Next month we’ll release free (that’s right) CDs of the music on that tour — with brief readings from The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God. Yeah. We’re behind these books.
Trying to break the one-nation/one-designated-book stranglehold.
Last winter Harry Potter sucked up all the printing capacity in the country; we had a three-week production delay as a result of all that.
Our marketing director asked me to start the year with a few phone calls to reviewers. We’re sending her on the road, too. We need reviews to convince folks that Jonathan Saffran Foer’s aren’t the only readable books outside the mainstream. (Wait. Is he outside the mainstream? Isn’t Walter Kirn the mainstream now?) I bet Knopf has the same problem. And Norton. I mean, how many folks know how good James Lasdun is?
Do reviews still sell books? If so, would everybody still be reading the same anointed novel?
No time. I have galley mailings to do next week. And more blurbs to solicit. I checked the mailbox this afternoon — nothing from John Berger yet.
And I have to put together a three-year plan for the company that should be a five-year plan.
Even some of the solicited manuscripts behind me are over three months old.
What lasts. Which manuscript.
That was a line from Laura Hendrie’s first book — “What Lasts” — actually, it was the title of one chapter. I have a river stone in my garden inscribed with those words: What Lasts. No punctuation. It isn’t a question; it’s an assertion. About the stone, I think. What Lasts. Which manuscript? What time is it now?
Are there time and energy enough tonight to read another of those stories before I fall asleep?
I hope so. Let’s see. . .
Fred Ramey
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
Previous Entry: Is Fiction Necessary? | Next Entry: Was All That Brouhaha Good for Us?
Comments
But you’re building something good, Fred. And THAT will last.
——-
Posted by jason evans 01/05 07:33 AM
The main problem was that the three Baudelaires were still avoiding Count Olaf. At first, they thought they had a solution, by going to the village on the coastal shelf, but then the villagers abandoned them. So in the end…there really is no solution
Posted by Banner Printing 07/28 04:22 PM