Read Me, Seymour!

Author Unknown

You’ve written three novels. After years of toil, most of it pleasurable (an apt definition of writing), enduring countless maybes, the quite interested and even an option from Hollywood, you ended up self-publishing. Not the happy ending you envisioned, with heady book tours and glowing reviews on myriad websites. But parking your books on the computer like an old tax return? No fucking way.

“Years of effort” is actually an understatement. You’d spent decades on these novels. High art or not you knew they were high concept. Your first, The Last Generation imagined a world bereft of children, slowly dying out. Yet, and this was the kicker, nothing else was wrong. For the remaining shrinking population, life simply went on. What does this last generation do with itself? Your marketing line: It’s not the end of the world, just the end of us.

Your second novel is a modern fable about God and advertising, The Happy Soul Industry. In it, God, frustrated by a world lacking belief, puts an angel on earth to find an ad agency in order to market spirituality. In the third act all hell breaks loose.

Your third story, Sweet By Design is a romantic comedy (!) about a disillusioned gay man and an aging female socialite, brought together on an improbable road trip.  This one you wrote to prove you could be whimsical and, being honest here, entirely commercial. Whatever your motivations and inspirations, you never worked harder in your life than on these three books. In doing so, you developed a keen appreciation for even the shoddiest novels at the airport bookstand. Readers who weren’t writers would never comprehend, couldn’t possibly, the effort required to scribe 300 pages of anything. Thinking. Rethinking. Writing. Rewriting. Losing weeks of content. Fighting demons. Overcoming doubt.  And then, when you honestly thought it was finally done, the painful discovery of a typo on the very first page, then another and another, a repeated paragraph – How did that happen?  How many more things were wrong?

To be continued…

(If interested in any of these books please click on the links right side of this blog!)

Author Unknown (3)

Oh, but how you want to be known for something! Even for just one book. One story. Being published is a fantasy as powerful as any opiate, more so because of your tireless effort. Each book was an obsession, like Captain Ahab’s Great White Whale, Ernest Shackleton’s quest to find the arctic passage, compelling you forward, driving you insane. You forsook everything to write –parties, movies, dinners with your wife, talking and fucking. _______ vacillated between resignation and resentment, jealous of your ardor for writing, how you cherished the craft more than her. It would pay off, you told her, you told yourself. When you became a known commodity.

You came so close…

The meetings in Hollywood were electric, with so many important people giving a shit about you and your work. Even so, the pinnacle eluded you. For your first book you settled with a dozen mostly positive reviews on Amazon and a $7,500 dollar option from Touchstone Pictures that went nowhere. Your second and third novels had equally mixed results. None were failures. But none were great successes, at least in terms of the marketplace.

Self-publishing demanded you do your own marketing and publicity. Being an ad man you took this on with gusto. For The Last Generation, you produced a teaser video, which can still be found on You Tube. You created billboards and posters for The Happy Soul Industry. For Sweet By Design you hosted an online book cover contest, giving away an iPad to the winner. Each book had its own website, Facebook and Twitter. You wrote press releases. You wrote more queries, this time looking for options, reviewers and always a legitimate publisher. Above all, you wrote checks. Lots of checks. Some days it felt like buying lottery tickets. Other times you were pissing in the wind. But you paid. You would always bet on yourself.

To be continued…

(If you’re interested in any of my books please click on the links right side of this blog!)

At long last, the winners for “Sweet by Design.”

Debbie Pahls’ inspired cover “Wallpaper” is the winner of my novel slash social media experiment, Sweet by Design. Her design will be the cover of my new novel. She also wins an iPad, the better prize! Debbie Pahls is a freelance art director in Kansas City and my new best friend. Congratulations, Debbie.

Second place, and the iPod Shuffle goes to Dana Lambert’s exceptional cover design, entitled “Frame.”

In the words of celebrity judge, M.J. Rose:

“It was close between the frame and the wallpaper – wallpaper won. So integrated and creative… Most important, the elements work together to create a whole that is compelling, unusual and provocative… Nuanced and balanced. Well done! ”

I completely agree. As did many of you. Both Pahls and Lambert received the lion’s share of write-in votes. At one point or another I regarded each of the finalists as a personal favorite. Any one of them would make fabulous covers. Thank you all -readers, designers and the just plain curious. I could not have done it without you. Literally.

Pahls, on her cover:

“This typographical solution integrates the title of the book “Sweet by Design” and the name of the author as part of a damask wallpaper pattern. The sweet, flowery vintage feel of the wallpaper would fit in well in Audrey’s Chicago Gold Coast residence, and it is a nod to Jeffrey’s profession as an interior designer. This wall covering is beautiful and elegant, however it is a layer that is beginning to pucker and peel. It is starting to reveal the not-so-pretty wall that is it hiding behind it. This visual is symbolic of Jeffrey peeling away his layers to get to the truth and revealing his reality.”

The wait is over. Presenting the finalists for the “Sweet by Design” cover contest.

What a week for yours truly…But like the man said, the show must go on! The “novel slash social media experiment,” Sweet by Design is finally over. It took a bit longer than I’d anticipated; reformatting the novel for WordPress was time-consuming. And since I was adding links and photography along with text the task grew even harder. But it was worth it.

In terms of the cover contest, it appears the added time allowed for some pretty terrific 11th hour creations, several ‘sweet’ designs submitted in the last 24 hours. Frankly, most of the covers were damn good -arguably better than my silly book! All 70 of them can be viewed on the blog and will remain there indefinitely. Thank you, each and every entrant, reader and observer for making my So-Me experiment a success. More people read at least part of SBD than the combined total readers for my previous two novels combined.

I’d also like to thank my co-judge, best-selling author and digital publishing pioneer, M.J. Rose. Her input was a key factor in helping me choose the winning entries.

This is how the judging worked. The panel was divided into three voting parts. M.J. had a third of the vote, me another third, and your voting comments represented the final third. Pretty simple. Through this process, we came up with eight finalists, one of which will be chosen for the cover of my novel, Sweet by Design as well as win the author’s unused iPad. The second place vote getter gets an iPod Shuffle. Those two winners will be announced next week. I promise!

Please visit Sweet by Design for designer credits, book chapters and other tidbits. Enough blather… Without further ado, here are the finalists:

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Immortality and art. Reflections from a library.

Books unread and way past due…

Recently, I attended a charity auction for my kid’s school at a downtown club, where I found myself having a Don Draper moment in the unattended library, a stuffy, decrepit sort of room where the nicked and worn bookcases were filled with countless navy and maroon hardcover volumes. Clearly, none had been opened in many years. Maybe decades. There was dust on all of them. I even saw cobwebs.

I gazed upon the titles. I’d never heard any of them or their authors. I opened one up and read a few paragraphs, something about a bachelor going over his dead father’s keepsakes. The man’s name was Jack. Or was it Henry or Bill. Anyway, the sentences were finely written. They moved along nicely enough. For a moment I could almost see myself sitting down in the nearby armchair. But no. I already had a bad rap as being anti-social, especially at events like these. If my wife caught me wiling away the evening reading I’d catch hell. The car ride home would feature another steely lecture. I put the book back. Sliding it into the slot, I imagined the bookcase, a la Sherlock Holmes, opening up into a secret passage! Wishful thinking. I’d have to go back to my party.

Before adjourning to the ballroom, I pondered the books once more, and their authors, now so utterly forgotten. When I was younger I thought being a published author was the pinnacle of achievement. For me, it was the goal of goals. The penultimate. Even deeper I believed creating a book was a form of immortality, a legacy. I knew someday I would. Had to. Otherwise, it seemed to me, my inevitable death would be in vain.

Now, gazing upon these hundreds of decaying volumes, I had a different view. There is no immortality, even through books. Unless you are blessed with creating a masterpiece like Moby Dick or Portrait of the Young Man as Artist, nobody but no one will care about it or you. And even in the unlikely event you did create a masterwork, you’d still fade eventually. Ashes to ashes. Dust jackets to dust jackets. High school kids would be required to read your prose but they would do so begrudgingly. A few nerds might carry the torch, less and less of them every year.

Needless to say, the same epitaph exists for movies and other art. For every Hemingway or Caravaggio there are millions of fabulous nobodies. People like me. I’ve written three novels, struggled to have two of them published, and dozens of short stories last read by a college professor whose name I can’t recall anymore than he would my stories.

Staring up at all these old books, I realized how silly my ambition was. Legacy! Please. Besides my kin, who in the hell did I think would read my stories? In fifty years my novels would be lucky –damn lucky- to be housed in a decrepit room such as this. Unlikely, given they are paperbacks. Even online they will be “out of print.” Maybe even –gasp!- Google proof!

Still, I would not trade the years I spent toiling on my books for anything. The countless hours I’ve spent conjuring tales are among the best times of my life. Selfish in the extreme, it was and is the one place where I felt and feel in control. Certainly more so than in all those mind numbing cocktail parties I’d attended and will attend.

So, what’s the lesson here? What is my point? I think it has something to do with living in the present and not worrying about the future or fretting over the past. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating hedonism. This does not mean sex, drugs and rock and roll. Lord knows I tried that. It means if my present is about writing (be it books or ad copy) then that is what I should do. It is my ambition that needs to be tempered. Rethought anyway. For all my blessings, my ambition got me right here, between a few hundred unremembered books and about as many drunks in the next room.

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