Why It Takes So Long

Why does it take a year for a book to go from a draft to bookstore shelves? Is it to build anticipation? Because publishers are modern-day Neanderthals, trying to make e-books by rubbing sticks together? Because authors are so precious?

The correct answer is: yes! In more detail, it’s because this*:

MONTH 1

The editor and the author kick things off by exchanging emails about how happy they are to be working with one another. The editor prepares an EDIT LETTER, which is a document describing how fantastic the book is, and how even more fantasticer it would be if the following thirty or so issues were addressed. I put EDIT LETTER in caps because it’s very important. The author considers this. There is some back and forth over any parts of the EDIT LETTER that the author requires more clarification on to fully understand what kind of universe the editor must be living in to say such a thing.

MONTHS 2-4

The author rewrites. How long this takes depends on how much rewriting is required, and how depressed the author gets. All books have been through at least a couple author-driven drafts before they’re picked up by a publisher, but obviously another pass is needed, because why else editors. An editor who says, “Fine as is!” might as well go panhandle.

Also, books at this stage really do need rewriting.

In my case, I did a lot of rewriting for my editor on Company, and the publication process took 22 months. I didn’t do much on Syrup, and it took nine. So there is possibly a causal link there.

The art department begins fooling around with cover ideas, under strict instructions to not share them with anybody, especially authors.

MONTHS 5-6

The editor approves the rewritten draft and shares it internally with salespeople, the art department, and unrelated editors’ assistants. I’m not sure why assistants; I just know every editorial assistant I’ve ever met has read all my books.

The editor and author begin seeking people to provide a blurb/cover quote. The first edition can’t have actual reviews on the cover, because those will be received too late. But you need someone to say “MAGNIFICENT… STUNNING,” so you have to hit up a fellow author.

The copyeditor prints out the new draft and scrawls arcane markings on it by the light of tallow candles using quills. This ensures the book can no longer be shared electronically, and all subsequent changes must be done by hand. This five-hundred-page monstrosity is photocopied and e-mailed to the author. Sorry, that was a typo. I mean mailed. You know. Mailed. When they physically transport something. The author reads this by light of a virgin moon, which is the only time the unicorn ink becomes visible, and accepts some changes while giving others a jolly good stet. This can be a difficult time for the author, who must defend grammatical errors as stylistic choices in order to not look stupid.

The editor emails the author a scan of the finished cover art, saying, “Everyone here loves this!” The author may object to aspects of it, if he is an ungrateful asshole who thinks he knows how to publish books better than a, you know, publisher.

The book’s layouts are developed: the internal artwork, including the fonts, spacing, and style of chapter headings.

Publicity plans are developed, and final-ish decisions made on things like price and publication dates.

MONTHS 7-8

The manuscript is transformed into a galley, which is the final, copyedited version embedded in the layouts. When I say “transformed,” I mean someone sits down with the five-hundred-page copyedited manuscript, which by now has been scrawled on by at least two and probably four different people, with additional pages inserted here and there, and some of the changes stetted and then destetted and maybe redesteted again, some of which are impossible to read because I had to use a green pencil to signify which changes were mine and I couldn’t find a sharpener and I was trying to squeeze between the printed lines and thought I had enough room but didn’t. This person types all that out. I have never met them, because, I assume, they are kept in a basement and fed raw fish.

The author is sent galleys of forthcoming books by authors who agreed to consider giving a blurb, in case he wishes to reciprocate, while maintaining artistic integrity.

The Advanced Reader Copies are produced, which are like galleys, but one step closer to the finished version. They’re for reviewers and various promotions (a lot of Machine Man ARCs were given out at Comic Con last year), and are essentially the finished book, minus any late editorial changes, printed on cheap paper, and possibly with different cover art.

The author reads the latest galley/ARC and notices several horrendous errors that somehow escaped previous notice. He writes in with corrections.

The audio version is developed.

The author corresponds with translators attached to various foreign publishers, who want explanations for odd word choices. These will probably be published many months or even years later, and look super exotic.

MONTHS 9-10

The publisher pitches its quarterly list to large bookstore chains and buyers. I believe they actually sit down in a room, and the editor or marketing manager or whoever says, “Now THIS is a title we’re very excited about, it’s OH GOD PLEASE BUY ME by Max Barry,” and they have a little discussion about the author’s sales record and whether people are really interested in that kind of book any more, so that the bookstore chain/buyer can decide how many copies to stock. If they choose a low number, the book is essentially dead, because no-one will see it, and the publisher will scale back its marketing plans, because why spend money promoting a book no-one knows about. But if it’s a high number, there will be renewed excitement and high-fives and a little extra marketing budget for things like co-op (payment to bookstores for favorable shelf placement). The author can tell which it is because if it is a low number, the publisher won’t tell him.

Thanks to the amazing new website Random House has for its authors, I know they call this process “working with the accounts on an ongoing basis to estimate initial purchase quantities.”

The ARCs go out to newspapers, blogs, magazines, and anyone else who wants a copy and has an audience of more than three people. Interview and feature requests begin to come in and are scheduled by the publicity department. Early reviews come in and are forwarded to the author, unless they’re bad.

An e-book version is developed via a process involving priests and goats’ blood. Not really. It’s really done by re-typing the entire book from the finished, typeset manuscript. Nah, I’m still kidding. They take the last electronic document and just try to reimplement all the manual changes made since then by hand. You can decide which of those it is.

Due to piracy concerns, the e-book is closely guarded, so often cannot be reviewed by the author. Instead it is distributed to anyone with a blog and a netgalley.com account.

MONTHS 11-13

More reviews come in, and early interviews/profiles are conducted. The author, who has spent the last two years alone with a keyboard, begins spending large parts of each day talking or writing about himself, sowing the seeds for future personality disorders.

The publisher does whatever it is that needs to be done to ensure that tens of thousands of physical copies end up in the right place at the right time. I assume that’s something.

The book is published! The author catches the bus to the nearest bookstore to discover they’re not stocking it. Calls to agent ensue. The author may go on tour, which could involve dozens of cities over many weeks, or just popping into local bookstore and plaintively offering to sign copies, if they have some, like out the back or whatever.

During a book reading, the author notices a horrendous error that somehow escaped the editorial process.

The author wakes three-hourly to check his Amazon.com sales ranking.

And that’s about it.

* Note: Blog may represent one-sided author’s view of a process he actually knows little about, with gaps in knowledge filled with speculation and lies.

I Have a New Book

My fifth novel will be out in mid-2013. If you’re wondering how I manage this breakneck pace, with Machine Man gracing the shelves only last year, it’s because I haven’t been updating my web site or going on Twitter or Facebook. It’s amazing how much time that leaves. Also, I broke my usual pattern of following good novels with unpublishable ones. It’s a bold new strategy but I’m optimistic that it might just work out.

The new book is Lexicon. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to know anything more, because you have already decided to read it and want your experience to be untainted by any hint of a spoiler, then (a) thank you, (b) I am right there with you, and (c) you may skip ahead to the next paragraph. For everyone else, it is about a secret persuasion society that builds and deploys words as weapons. The people who wield these words are known as poets; the story centers around a young woman who is recruited into their ranks, and the man she falls in love with. Which you are not allowed to do, as a poet. I could explain why, but I’m not going to. Just trust me.

I began writing this book about five years ago, although it has changed so radically from my early sketches that I may just go back and write a second, completely different book from the same original idea. Usually, I start a novel with a particular situation in mind, but this time I had a concept, and unfortunately a concept is not a story. A concept is somewhere for a story to live. So I ended up writing a lot of words, looking for the story inside this concept. I always take a kind of sick pride in the number of words that don’t make it into my final drafts; the notes, doodles, experiments, deleted scenes, et cetera. I usually have at least as many of these as published words. This time, I have far more: 197,788. Actually, that is a little appalling. I hadn’t totaled that up before. But I’m still proud, because those words led to good ones.

Lexicon will be published by The Penguin Press in mid-2013 in the US and Canada. Details to come on other countries.

This Sentence is Already Too Long

Blogs are dying. Not this blog. I mean in general. This blog’s just fine. Okay, yes, it has been a little while since the last post, but that’s just because I was busy writing. Well. Rewriting. It’s like writing, only with less visible progress. With writing, you can feel reasonably assured that what you put on the page is better than what was there before. Not always! But mostly. Rewriting, though, you can spend a good six hours on a scene, sit back, and think, “Yep… that’s worse.”

Anyway. Blogs are OUT. They’re too long. That’s the problem. No-one has the time for them. The middle is hollowing out. Everything is polarizing. We want things to be very. It doesn’t matter what. Whatever it is, only very. There’s no place for mid-length writing any more. There never was, of course. But blogs used to be short. Then Twitter. Now blogs are like One Day Cricket.*

But here we are! And it’s already been more than 140 characters. So let’s continue. This blog will summarize what I’ve been thinking about over the last few months, while I was busy making my new book not worse.

• Sneaker riots. The first one or two were kind of shocking to me, like a thought come to life. The next few were disappointing, like repeated plot points. But now we’re at, what, the seventh Nike sneaker riot? When does it become less likely that they’re continually being surprised by this kind of thing happening and more likely that they’re deliberately engineering it? That’s just a question. I’m just wondering.

• Syrup movie. Now in post-production. I have been shown a teaser-trailer thing and it is heartbreakingly beautiful. I’ve watched it three hundred times. I’m not joking. The only thing that sucks about the Syrup movie is I’m not allowed to tell you anything. But soon. Soon…

• Privacy. This interests me because privacy is obviously very important for reasons nobody understands. Generally, there’s a much stronger incentive for companies and governments to want to know things about you than for you to keep your data private. That leads to an interesting place.

• Persuasion. This is the most valuable skill in the world, right? People who are good at persuading others become rich and successful; people who are easily persuaded by others do not. But nobody really thinks about this. Very few people actually go out and learn how to be better at persuasion, or more aware of its forms. Why is that?

  Also, the US as a culture is very advanced at soft persuasion (i.e. the forms of persuasion that don’t involve threats of bodily harm). It is great at selling stuff. We have the Internet and free access to vast stores of information but we’re still buying products with the cleverest ads, and electing politicians with the most reassuring voices. I wonder what happens if a culture becomes so good at persuasion that there is no longer an incentive to produce products that are just objectively good, as opposed to well-sold.

• Privacy + Persuasion. It’s easier to persuade people if you know more about them. And if you can persuade them, you can get more information from them. That’s an interesting dynamic, too.

• Piracy. But this is too depressing for now so I’ll blog about it later.

That’s a lot of Ps, for some reason.

(* This analogy works because even if you don’t know cricket, you know it is stupid and anachronistic.)

Video: Machine Man Book Reading

A long video of a Machine Man book reading at Embiggen Books in Melbourne, Australia (October 2011).

Stating the Obvious: Actors

Lately I’ve been feeling sympathy for actors. I never used to feel that. I used to think actors deserved NOTHING, because they’re already beautiful and adored. And people are swoon over how clever and cool they must be in real life, because apparently they improvised their best lines and YOU KNOW WHAT NO THEY DID NOT. They played the damn character that was written for them, that’s what they did. The alternative only gets play because people believe in their hearts that movies are real.*

Essentially, I viewed actors as mindless automatons waiting to be filled with words. Attractive automatons, to be sure. They’re a fine looking bunch. And they’re good at pretending. But that’s not a particularly impressive skill. I mean, kids do it. So I’ve never really rated actors as more deserving of respect than, say, jugglers. Especially jugglers who can balance on things while they juggle. That shit is not easy.

But this was before I actually spent time on a film set. I found that educational in a few ways. For one thing, I had to act. Only a little. I’m kind of abusing the term here. I mostly had to stand in one place and not sneeze. But there was a time when I had to move parts of my body in a coherent way while fifty people and a very expensive camera stared at me, and that turned out to be harder than I expected. There is a pressure element. So I concede that acting, or doing anything, really, is more challenging when a lot of people’s time and money is riding on you not screwing it up.

But the real eye-opener was how actors have to do what they’re told. Not always. Sometimes actors can say, “I’m not really feeling that line,” and the director will say, “Let’s try it both ways,” and the actor can perform a take differently while knowing in their soul that it will never be seen again. Actors are also free to perform minor on-the-fly sentence surgery, so long as they get the essence right. In some cases, they really can propose something different, and if the director agrees, they get to do it. But mostly they have to say the lines.

So if I write, “6 looks surprised,” then Amber Heard has to go ahead and look surprised. I want you to take a moment to think about how much you would enjoy it if you were world famous and had to look surprised just because I wanted you to. Because I would hate it. I would be all, “I tell you what, how about you go fuck yourself?” Now, okay, this probably just means I would make a crappy actor. I already knew that. And I knew actors had to say the lines. That is the most fundamental part of their job. If they weren’t prepared to do it, they would find something else to do, like juggle while balancing on things.

But still. I realize more and more how spoiled I am to own the entire process of creating a novel. I don’t need anyone’s permission to start writing. I don’t need to convince people to sign off on doing a part of the story a particular way. I just do it. You might argue that this isn’t a good thing. And I might argue, why don’t you get off my site, if you hate me so much. But for better or worse, I enjoy the ability to determine how I do my job.

Actors don’t have that. They have to give themselves to a role no matter how shitty. They’re totally dependent on being offered good scripts, and if they’re not, they have to perform bad ones. When they perform bad roles, even when they do a good job, people think they’re bad actors, because people think movies are real.* An actor might never once get the chance to perform a role at their best. Which is kind of horrifying.

Of course, they can console themselves with their immense beauty.

(* They are real. All stories are real.)

Subtextual

Now there’s this app, Subtext, that lets you read books and share your comments about them in real-time with other people reading the same book. Little speech bubbles in the margins pop up: you tap them, you get to read what other people are saying about a particular plot twist, or character death, or whatever.

In some cases, the author has gone through and made a bunch of those comments him or herself, and these read a little like a DVD commentary track.

I mention this because I’m one of those authors: Machine Man is one of their launch titles. So, if, you know, you feel I’ve been too secretive about the creative process behind Machine Man so far, now is your chance for some insight.

At first I thought you would have to turn those comments off when reading a Subtext book, at least the first time through, because otherwise that would be really distracting. But I have found that this is impossible. You know the comments are lurking there, and it’s too much to resist turning them back on when you’re wondering, “Does anyone else think this story just completely went off the rails?”

So that’s pretty cool. Not from an author’s perspective. From an author’s perspective, it’s horrible. I want you to sit there and read what I’ve damn well written for you. But as another example of users seizing control over their own entertainment experiences, it seems significant.

Movie news! I just changed the subject. That’s what happened there. Mark Heyman, the scriptwriter of Black Swan, who’s been busy working on what I have to say is a freaking fantastic Machine Man script, I know I’m not allowed to tell anyone, Mandalay, BUT IT IS AWESOME, has sold his “Facebook thriller” script XOXO, with Darren Aronofsky producing. So it’s all going pretty nicely in Heyman-land. Syrup is deep in post-production and I still haven’t seen it, not that I’m thinking about it every ten minutes or anything. And the leads are busy: Amber Heard is doing interviews for The Rum Diary, and Shiloh Fernandez is becoming an eco-terrorist.