To Kindle or not to Kindle?
March 29, 2008 05:08
To Kindle or not to Kindle?
by Tom Maremaa
That's the question I wrestled with before deciding recently to move ahead and publish two novels, The Lottery Ticket and I Am Marjan, as Kindle Editions in the category of literary fiction.
It was not an easy decision: I had written both books with the intention of placing them with a New York agent and a conventional print publisher. Both works came to me spontaneously and wrote themselves over a period of time, working long nights and weekends, as I channelled the voices of each narrator emotionally and through some creative process I can't describe. Both works, modesty aside, are originals; nobody's done before. So what happened?
I approached the usual list of agents, but found no takers. Both books never made it to the eyes of a curious editor or publisher. My original agent at Curtis, Brown, Ltd, the president of the company, had long retired; my editor at William Morrow & Co. had left the company to go off and write his own novels in New Hampshire. Needless to say, I was at loose ends. Productive, considering I had a demanding day job, but cast to the winds of an unknown fate. Both books deserved a chance.
The Lottery Ticket was about a murder trial in Silicon Valley, dealing with a comically dysfunctional family, ripe with heated exchanges of dialogue among the various members of that family. There was an interweaving of portions of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a counterweight to the story. Having lived and worked in Silicon Valley for a number of years, I prided myself on making the narrator's voice and language as authentic as I possibly could. The book served up a tasty slice of life in the maelstrom of the tech world. New York wasn't interested and didn't come calling. Maybe if I had set the story in the City . . . and changed the characters to New York types . . . and . . .
Well, the same thing occurred with I Am Marjan, a tale of magic realism about an extraordinary lion, based on the true story of Marjan, the one-eyed lion in the Kabul zoo who came to represent the suffering of the Afghan people under the tyranny of the Taliban. I told the story in the first person, in the voice. That seemed appropriate, but was it? A story in the voice of a . . . lion? Again, I expended much time and energy in querying agents, but the results were the same.
When I returned to both works recently, I found parts that needed some re-writing and re-shaping, but essentially, both novels just needed to find an audience, a readership, a younger generation willing to take on the reading of an e-book. That's when I decided to run with Kindle Editions.
I'm not recommending this as the only course of action for writers who have produced new work. It may be better to let new work age a bit, like a good wine, and then revisit that work to see if it has possibilities and can attract a readership. Not every work should be blindly produced and published as an e-book, whether on Amazon Kindle or elsewhere.
When in doubt, I always ask my mentor James Joyce, What would he do? Would he be able to find a publisher for his collection of short stories, Dubliners, or his autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Ulysses, the greatest work of fiction written in the 20th century? I think the answer is clear: Joyce would not hesitate for one moment to publish his work as e-books. It's hard to believe but Joyce struggled for years to get Dubliners published; even his fellow Irish printers refused to print the stories in the collection because they found the material somehow objectionable.
As it happens, Joyce's last story in the collection, "The Dead," is without doubt the greatest story I've ever read in the English language. It will stand the test of time, as will Ulysses, which only got published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach in Paris because Joyce had some good friends to help things along, like Ezra Pound, friends who supported him and believed in his genius. Ulysses would never find a publisher in New York today; it's too experimental, too difficult, too long. It's not solid commercial work; not genre or formula, is it?
Amazon really did something extraordinary by introducing Kindle; the impact is not yet fully known. But for me, it's truly the wave of the future in publishing. I can't see how the conventional model will sustain itself with hard-bound books going for $25 a pop, books that appear unreadable a second time around, books that end up remaindered and forgotten. Remember, a Kindle Edition of your book is always available, never "out of print." Currently, there are over 115,000 titles available in the Kindle Store on the Amazon website, although the device itself is backordered and not available for purchase (demand for a $400 device is huge, apparently).
A younger generation of readers is emerging, and they're building up libraries comprised of e-books (you can store up to 80 books on the device). They're reading the classics in e-book format, and not thinking about having the feel of turning paper pages in the conventional book. That's a big change. The stats are remarkable: there's been a 59% increase in sales of e-books in 2007, according to the data from the International Digital Publishing Forum. This year, the number could grow higher still.
For a long time, nobody thought downloads of songs from a website would take off; we were stuck in the $20 price range for a CD of which we only wanted to listen to two songs. Apple and iTunes changed all that (full disclosure: I work at Apple in software engineering).
We may be at a similar inflection point with e-books. Amazon has a device that's quite exceptional, though not by any means perfect. But it's already building a huge library of titles, priced reasonably, from which you can choose.
What does it take to convert your manuscript to the format that Kindle can display and render? Well, the mechanics are straightforward enough. You convert an existing book into HTML format, sign up with Amazon, write a brief description of the book, then do a book design -- and you're in business. All those steps can be time-consuming (they were for me, and I'm a software engineer), but not impossible. You end up playing many roles beyond writing: you get to be your best editor, best HTML web monkey, best book designer, proofreader, marketeer. I wouldn't take on these tasks unless you've got some distance from your manuscript; you've reached a point of objectivity with regard to the quality of the text, a point where you don't fall in love with every word on every page. That helps.
Ultimately, it's the originality of what you've written that survives the test of time. If your work is like the work of others, you may find a home in conventional print publishing. Publishers like to see work that they've seen before. They want you to be "like" another writer they're comfortable with, so you can be marketed as the next Stephen King or John Grisham. That's how it works, in my view. Now if you want to reach another level of readership, which can be a very risky business because it takes time, and you're willing to take a chance and do work that hasn't been done before, you can rest assured your work won't be in vain. You can move toward publishing it as an e-book, on Kindle, rather than relegate the manuscript to your basement trunk.
Tom Maremaa is the author of a half dozen novels, including most recently, Soldiers of Orange, a semifinalist in the ABNA competition. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he studied languages, literature and philosophy at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and worked on his Ph.D in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked as an editor, teacher of writing, tennis professional, and software developer. He lives with his wife in Silicon Valley, and travels widely to learn about, and understand as many cultures and languages as he can. He can be reached at tom.maremaa@gmail.com .