Who Is King?

This week saw the fifth in a series of meetings at work with a marketing guru/consultant. It's been quite an education. Mostly because I had to learn marketing jargon and all those endless catchphrase buzzwords in Hebrew instead of English. He has been attempting to help us become a more 'effective' book publishing 'team', giving us 'tools' to improve the 'statistical outputs' of our discussions on what to translate or what not to.

But the most interesting thing he said he left till the last few minutes of the last meeting. He rightly pointed out that what causes people to listen to a particular radio station is not necessarily a specific song or artist, rather the radio DJ. It is the promise of the DJ or the station's taste and judgement that prompts people to listen to this or that station.

Similarly, he argues, when people walk into a bookshop they should be able to choose a book based on its publishing house, or the fact that it is the favorite book of one of their favorite authors, or because it belongs to a particular series based on a genre or literary style that they enjoy. He proposed making a brand out of a publishing house, so that people will buy a book based on its derivation from a particular publisher irrespective of its content. The bookbuyer trusts the judgement of the publishing house.

This was met with widespread skepticism. "Nobody pays attention to the publisher" they cried, or "we don't have a particular genre interest, our lists are too varied to be effectively branded into one 'identity'". As I'm sure some of you are already working out, there are clear, if not easy solutions to follow in order to solve these problems.

But why is what he said so clever? Because as our dear guru explained, banking on a book or an author to sell itself (even with all the help of marketing), is essentially a passive action. You didn't write the book, and you're not the author, therefore you are trapped in the role of being a mediator of content instead of a creator of it.

The minute you accept that you have something more to give as a major publishing house, that the combined intellectual property of the minds at your disposal constitutes a creative force in and of itself (instead of just an editorial one), is the moment you take back control of the market.

Simply put - we were being called upon to add value.

Now, value can manifest as various different things, and this brings me to my title. In a world increasingly flooded not just with writers who are getting publishing deals, but with authors who are self-publishing, and where anyone with a computer and the internet can become a content-creator all by themselves, what kind of value will be truly appreciated?

In the flood, the man in the ark is king. The person who can help other people navigate a tumultuous and chaotic sea is the one who holds a power of real value.

A lot of people say that these days, content is king. I would hazard that, going forward, infrastructure will be king. The ability to generate lists of recommendation, to associate books to larger narratives (the 10 books that inspired bestselling writer 'X', for example), to make a publishing house into a brand with a specific identity that people recognize and trust (as with Virago), in short, to draw lines of delineation and definition in the endless sand of digital content - the person or the company with that skill, will be king.

Best Of The Best

I'll admit, I'm one day late (or maybe even a couple of days late) to be presenting anyone with the best of the 'best of 2011' lists, but I'll do it anyway for those of you, like me, still catching up to the fact that we've entered another year.

So, in no particular order and without revealing my collating strategies, here are some of the notable books of 2011, drawn from lists as diverse (but not limited to) Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, Goodreads, BookPage and The Guardian.


The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
The Sisters Brothers - Patrick Dewitt
The Language of Flowers - Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Divergent - Veronica Roth
Stephen King 11/22/63
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell


Pitting myself against these list picks produces interesting results. I read The Marriage Plot and really didn't like it; though I'll concede Eugenides can write a pretty sentence and often touch upon authentic sentiment, I found the book unwieldy, rambling and frankly, a little pointless. The reason I should find this so damning is that Eugenides could have written the book of my generation, those graduating from college into a tough economic climate where it's much more common to stay 'lost' and 'unsure' and to take multiple gap years than it is to settle down to marriage or buckle down to work (or buckle down to marriage and settle down to work - whichever sounds most true to you...). Perhaps it's unfair to expect Eugenides to give me an answer to the existential questions permeating post-grad life, but to be honest, it would have been nice.

The Night Circus is absolutely on my list. I am relishing the prospect of reading something that sounds like a perfect melding of Romeo and Juliet and Harry Potter, and I find myself recommending the book to friends without having read it myself. Best of all, it's been characterized as a 'literary/fantasy' text, and the combination of those two would be enough to have me hopping to an overpriced bookstore if I didn't already own an e-copy.

The Language of Flowers will always remain a favorite of mine. It's not that the book necessarily stays with you in some dramatic, life-altering kind of way. Rather, I was impressed with this book because it could have been kitschy and sentimental and it never, for a moment, was. Plus, the language of flowers gimmick was absolute genius, and I commend Diffenbaugh for having managed to marry it to such emotionally deep and complex subject matter.

State of Wonder was another book I didn't like and the lists did. I just couldn't connect to the protagonist, and the whole thing felt rather removed from our world in the way fantasy usually works - but in this case to the detriment of the novel instead of it's benefit. I'll admit though, Patchett's exploration of the future of female fertility was fascinating.

I'm tempted to sign off and stop rambling, but I can't without saying a word about Dewitt's The Sisters Brothers. An absolute find of a book. Cowboy noir is not my thing, but Dewitt has crafted a text that (so I hear), plays with generic convention at every turn, and finishes by offering something anyone can enjoy. His narrator, Eli, is funny and strangely adorable, in the way that poisonous snakes can be.

If I were to squeeze another book rec. in there, it would probably be Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, which really is as special as they say it is, but I have the sense that book will do the work of continuing to be a sensation all on it's own...

Happy New Year everyone! and happy reading...

Detectives: The Anti-Hero?

It strikes me somewhere after the 300th time I've read the synopsis for an upcoming detective novel, that almost every one of the blurbs starts off by describing our main protagonist as retiring or withdrawing from the line of duty.

Off they go to some remote, seaside or rural area to get away from it all, to relax, to leave the stress and horror of their jobs far behind. Or, they've often been forcibly and quietly retired from duty after unorthodox or unprofessional conduct.

Of course, they have but to arrive in said rural/briny region for a body to turn up or a person to go missing, and so begins the standard detective-killer runaround until all is revealed at the end and we pat ourselves on the back for having known who it was all along.

But why is it that we should be so keen to have our heroes be unwilling ones? We seem to be uncomfortable with the idea of a detective straightforwardly doing their job. When normally working, our detective is sanctioned by the institution to which they are attached - usually in some way an official representative of society engaged to solve crimes. Indeed, the detective might be said to fulfill a crucially ordering function, restoring truth to society's narrative and eliminating its threatening elements.

Why, then, do we insist on them not wanting to fulfill this function? Rather to fall into it, unwillingly, if inevitably?

One of our earlier detectives in fiction was Dickens' Mr. Bucket from Bleak House, and critics credit him with playing a reformist role that restores justice to English society in the way lawyers (like the dread Tulkinghorn) cannot. In this sense then, the detective emerges as a anti-hero figure who we trust in a position of power precisely because he does not seek it.

Of course, there must be many, notable exceptions to the phenomenon I am describing, and what's more, this popular tendency to 'anti' our heroes before they become them could merely be the result of the exigencies of a better plot. Still, I know I prefer my politicians un-power-hungry (utopian as that may seem), why not my detectives too?

Going To Stop

Last Monday was my driving test. I won't pretend I wasn't absolutely terrified of failing, because I have quite the history with not passing my driving tests, but I duly took myself down there with enough sleep and enough coffee balanced with fennel tea for calmness.


My wonderfully characterfull driving teacher took me round the test route a few times, telling me repeatedly to 'slow down' until I was going at about 15km per hour. As we reach a stop sign I begin to slow down but don't quite come to a complete stop. In slight panic, he begins to exclaim with increasing volume, "go to stop…go to stop!'


I will not dwell on my confusion at the seeming oxymoron of going to stop, nor on the actual driving test and my panic as the examiner exited the car without a word, and I was left flapping in confusion as to my status like a fish on dry land (in Israel there are laws against telling you whether you passed or not immediately after the test after an instructor was shot by a dissatisfied customer).


No, instead, I will focus on the phrase 'go to stop,' which seems to me to be a typically Israeli expression. This country is a land steeped in contradiction and paradox, of which this sentence is only one example. In practical terms, on the road, I can see this principle at work when Israelis barrel ahead at top speed heading toward a red light where they will only have to decelerate massively (no judgment I do this too).


But perhaps more suggestively we go forward with the idea of a religious-nation state only to have to stop at the limits of trying to combine synagogue and state in the modern world. We fight like mad to have a Jewish state and then find ourselves caught up in defining exactly which kind of Jews we mean. It is, perhaps, a paradox to hold on to a religious identity at all in today's world.


But I would like to think that (especially in today's world where its difficult to legitimately stand up for something) it's an admirable quality to retain one's enthusiasm and forward motion. It's no accident this country has been called 'Start-Up Nation,' and perhaps hurtling towards a red light can sometimes decrease road safety, but at least we make the effort to hurtle towards something at all.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

In the midst of updating favorite book covers on my website, I stumbled across a great site called bookcoverarchive.com. Browsing through their collection of incredible covers made me wish repeatedly that I'd read (at least some of) these books. Every cover was a perfect balance of visual pleasure, narrative cleverness and just enough of an edge of sophistication. Basically - almost exactly what I'd want in a book.

Here are a few of my favorites



























And then my personal top pick - grabbing that spot for its cruel relevance and perfect irony...




The problem was, the more the magic of the covers worked on me and the more I longed to read these books, the more I worried about my judgement. Surely we all know not to judge a book by its cover?

Except that actually, it's the only way we do. Marketing books and visiting book stores on a daily basis has, for the first time, put me on the front line of how books get bought, and unfortunately it's not my fabulously written copy or my persuasive presence that sells a book - it's the work of the graphic designer in the studio who may or may not have even read it.

This seems a little crazy, and feel free to disagree, but I can't help feeling that in the age of Facebook profiles and digital cameras we can't really be surprised that the first and last lines of defense are appearances.

[all covers are the copyright of their respective publishers]

Real Vintage Words This Time

Today saw the acquisition of about 60 second-hand English books. My mother and I paid a visit to the ESRA (English Speaking Residents Association) bookshop to do battle with groaning shelves and frayed pages.

Our final selection saw Plato thrown together with John Le Carre, and Defoe's Moll Flanders getting intimate with Holly Golightly and Nabokov's Lolita - keeping good company one and all.



Other pairings were perhaps more appropriate, like a Penn University Press book on The Poetics of Imperialism and Conrad's Lord Jim, or an unencountered Proust novel with R. D. Laing's The Divided Self.






Still, all this heavy literary name-dropping aside, the best thing about this visit was the chance to get my hands on about 10 old Everyman editions of the classics. Some seemed quite random (I won't say completely random because who knows where the holes in my literary historical knowledge might lie), but the main point wasn't to read the books, but to own them.

In my post-kindle (or two) world, the relation between buying books and reading them has changed completely. On Kindle, I will buy on impulse, (it's only '1-Click' after all), virtually fork out the 4.99 GBP and promptly forget all about the book if I don't need to read it for work or for class. It exists on my e-reader and assumedly backed-up somewhere in Amazon's labyrinthine archives, but as far as I'm concerned it might as well not exist in my possession at all - nothing more, really, than an item on my debit card bill.

But real books - on dead trees? Now there's something I'd like to own. Not read, necessarily, but just own. Looking ahead into the e-future of everything, I can't help but think (like most people) that reading an actual book may eventually disappear. But the physical book itself will not. Instead, e-book reading will bring about an increase in the value of a book, as they turn into possessions people want to own for the sake of having them.



Maybe this is awfully sad, the book divorced from its world-building, escapist capabilities, or it's function as a commentary on real life, but looking at my shelf of new, hard-backed, gilt-edged 'possessions', I find it hard to agree.

Assimilation and Driving

How long can you live in a place before it's starts to affect your personality?

It's been over two years that I've lived in Israel and only now do I find myself morphing into an Israeli. It's not that I actively tried not to before, just that I never found myself intensely affected by the difference in culture one way or another. but how strange that I should begin to mimic exactly what irritates me the most.

Simultaneously to raging vociferously (inside my car of course, with the windows tightly shut and sound muffled) about the Israeli need to beep when the traffic light turns orange, or of driving too fast or compulsively needing to change lanes to fill any available gap and get to one's destination that much faster, I drive the exact same way. And the thought of driving any other way makes me rage even more.

Thankfully, I still believe in the sanctity of indicating, or as the Americanized Israeli's put it, 'putting on de blinkerrr', a lost skill that has nearly disappeared from the Israeli road. My parking is also faultless, though I try not to read too much into my obsessive need to stay within the lines. But I wonder how long it will be before I too decide to park on a slant, taking up two bays and sticking my vehicular rear-end into the lot, and before my 'blinkerr' turns off, once, and for all.