Just a quick post for some good news—the paperback of The Tourist is selling quite nicely in the US, thank you.
For the week ending January 21, it reached #30 on the IndieBound list of bestselling trade paperbacks at independent bookstores across the US. The next week, ending January 28, it moved up to #24. That’s the kind of movement I like!
And for the week ending January 27, The Tourist reached #31 on the New York Times list…niiiice.
Very pleased.
In about ten minutes I’m going to get a call from New York, where I’ll be talking live and nationwide on WNYC’s The Takeaway about the collision between the Dubai assassination and spy fiction…
*RING!*
Later:
Well, it happened—a 4-minute window that went by in about 40 nanoseconds. Celeste Headlee did a great job, but I finished it agonizing about how stupid I’d sounded. Only after listening to it again did I realize I’d done okay.
You can visit the The Takeaway to listen to that little blip that is me. Or, click below for the mp3…
[The Takeaway, Olen’s 4 minutes]
Because this sort of thing is about all the TV I ever watch these days.
And just because.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0TyUOJfpQo&w=425&h=344]
Here’s a band called Pepe Mula, fronted by one of my students, Daviel, who’s also a budding director—in fact, he directed the space epic below. I’ll bet you never thought Leipzig looked like this…tres chic! I mean, Toll!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k2VHYsBXmQ&w=425&h=344]
Tomorrow marks the paperback release of The Tourist (Indie, Amazon, B&N), something I’m really looking forward to. The hardback—as I giggled about here—reached #19 on the New York Times list, and Minotaur is putting its best foot forward to try and get us on the paperback list.
What to do? Every writer wonders this when release date approaches, and the truth is that not much can be done. There are avid self-promoters who put their personal publicity machine into overdrive, but I’ve never been like that. Just putting together my little soundtrack, mentioned below, took about all my energy.
The only thing I can think of is to draw your attention to this starred Booklist review from the February 1 issue. It’s the first prepub look at The Nearest Exit, the second book of the trilogy, which will be out in May. Unlike my earlier quintet, these three books are meant to be read in order. They don’t have to be, but it certainly adds to the experience.
So think of it this way: If this Booklist review whets your appetite for The Nearest Exit, then now’s the time to pick up a copy of The Tourist, so that full enjoyment can be yours! Ah, hell—pick up a few for the family, friends, acquaintances and high-school friends you’ve lost track of while you’re at it. The weird guy who lives across the street? Yeah, he needs a few copies too.
And lest I forget: Thank you, Keir Graff:
Since the events of The Tourist (2009), Milo Weaver has served time in prison, worked in administration, and tried to reconnect with his wife and daughter. But talk therapy is hard when you’re trained to keep secrets. When asked to return to the field, he agrees, although, because of his disgust with the Department of Tourism (a black-ops branch of the CIA), he plans to feed information to his father, Yevgeny Primakov, the “secret ear” of the UN. But his handlers don’t trust him, either, giving him a series of vetting assignments that culminates in an impossible loyalty test: the abduction and murder of a 15-year-old girl. Ironically, Weaver is then tasked with finding a security breach that threatens the very existence of Tourism—and the lives of the Tourists. Seeing his own brutal compatriots as humans, he does his best to save the thing he despises, a conundrum that pretty much sums up the shades of gray that paint this modern-day espionage masterpiece. The Tourist was impressive, proving that Steinhauer had the ability to leap from the historical setting of his excellent Eastern European quintet to a vividly imagined contemporary landscape. But this is even better, a dazzling, dizzyingly complex world of clandestine warfare that is complicated further by the affairs of the heart. Steinhauer never forgets the human lives at stake, and that, perhaps, is the now-older Weaver’s flaw: he is too human, too attached, to be the perfect spy. His failure to save the girl he was told to kill threads the whole book like barbed wire.
—Keir Graff
As I mentioned before, the paperback of The Tourist (Indie, Amazon, B&N) will be released soon—on Tuesday the 16th, in fact. Back when it came out in hardback, I wondered what kind of extra material I might put up to accompany the book. In this case, an obvious proposition came to me—put together a soundtrack.
Those of you who know the book know that music plays an important part in it, and I used iTunes to put together a choice selection of 12 pretty cool tunes that are either featured in the novel, or acted as some kind of inspiration to me while writing it. I put together an iMix (as Apple likes to call them), but never got around to publishing it. Life, as usual, got in the way. But it’s paperback time now, which is a fine time to get the thing up. If it doesn’t convince you to buy The Tourist, then at least it’ll introduce you to some fine music that, perhaps, you’ve never met before.
Be forewarned: There’s a definite French slant to the mix. It was that kind of year, I suppose.
Hopefully you’ve got iTunes running on your machine, as clicking the picture of France Gall below should open up the program and let you listen to 30 second blocks of each song. (Or, the direct link to the mix is here.) If not, you’ve at least got a list of tunes to check out on your own.
Enjoy!
As I discussed before, I jumped into the whole e-book thing by purchasing a Kindle. It’s been fun owning the thing, and I’ve grown used to the interface, reading along at the same pace I would with a book. It’s particularly useful when reading manuscripts—I’ve got a potential-blurb novel on it now. I’ve bought a few titles from Amazon, but mostly I’ve been filling it with Gutenberg books using the Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-Books, which allows me to simply look at all their titles and click to automatically download it to my device. If you’ve got a wireless e-reader, then this is a must-have; you’ll be astounded by some of the titles they’ve got up there.
Of course, there’s a measure of guilt involved, as I’ve been learning more about how independent bookstores get screwed along the way, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to balance things. Little luck, but at least I’m thinking about it.
Then, I happened to be looking at my titles on Amazon and noticed my Kindle versions had vanished into thin air. I sent an email to my editor at St Martin’s, and she quickly filled me in on the Amazon-MacMillan head-to-head. As we all know, it was a short-lived fight, and Amazon backed down. But to get a larger picture of the conflict I started poking around the web for thoughts. One thing I saw repeated endlessly was the conviction by book buyers that not only was Amazon in the right for pricing their e-books down to $9.99, but that $9.99 was still too much. Some people considered this amount a scandal, saying they would never buy an e-reader until the books came down to a more reasonable price, say $5.00.
I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer—I’ll admit that—and I didn’t want to be a company tool, so I had to wonder about this. Is $9.99 too much? Is $15.00 too much? And how do we define “too much”? People point out (and I’ve pointed it out before) that an e-book costs almost nothing to produce. So isn’t any price put down pure profit?
Well, no, I’ve come to realize. First of all, the negligible cost we reference is for the transfer of a book into an e-book format. What it ignores is everything else that goes into the “making” of a book. The author’s time and labor and talent, for instance. And the writer doesn’t just get paid in royalties; he lives off of advances, which (ideally) allow a novelist to write without having to hold down extra jobs. The advances system is something no author wants to get rid of.
But a book’s not done there. Those who work in “traditional” publishing (that is, not self-publishing) know that a good editor is invaluable. He (or in my case, she) needs to get paid. So do the copyeditors who clean up those innumerable mistakes we all make.
But that’s not enough. As we all know, publishing a book does not equal sales, so marketing departments have to be put into service to make sure that buyers actually learn that a new title exists.
There’s more, of course—any large business requires an infrastructure to keep it chugging along without falling apart. Those in the mailroom need to get paid. Janitors need to get paid. So do the various specialists that raise the level of any sort of company—the designers who make the cover, for instance.
Thinking about all this leads to a bit of a mess. I doubt anyone can add up all those costs and then divide them correctly to tell you how much an individual story is worth. But there’s another way, and I asked my editor, Kelley Ragland, for some help on this.
My basic thesis, which I finally stumbled onto, is that an author (or a publishing company) shouldn’t make less money on a book because someone chooses to buy it in digital format. All the same work went into producing it. I work just as hard on a book that ends up on your screen as one that you buy on printed pages, and so does my publisher. Which leads to a very simple formula: The cost of the “real” book, MINUS the costs connected to printing and shipping that book, PLUS the cost of producing the e-book format should EQUAL the retail value of the e-book.
So I asked Kelley about hard numbers. She looked into her magic ball and came back with some estimates for my forthcoming (in May) novel, The Nearest Exit. Based on a guesstimate 50,000 printing, the costs of paper, printing, binding, and jacket per book is $1.53. To add in shipping, she suggests rounding up to $2.00.
Everything else stays the same. One could argue that the cost of warehouses for storing books could be removed, but MacMillan owns those warehouses, (they’re not printing less paper-based books), so it’s a company expense and not a book-specific cost.
You can see where I’m heading with this. List price, minus $2 = e-book price. In this case, The Nearest Exit’s list price is $26—the e-book price would be $24. Knock it down for a discounted price, like Amazon’s, which is $17.15, and you’re still at $15.15 for the e-book—which is around the price that MacMillan and other large publishers want e-books to be priced at.
Of course, I’m talking about the hardback price here, but that’s because, for a year, the hardback is the only thing available. That first year the story is new; its value is higher (again, this is how it’s always been, and, again, there’s no reason the publisher and author should make less money during this first year). However, if you base it on the paperback price (the list for a paperback of The Tourist, which will be released in 5 days, is $15), the cost of production costs you subtract would be less, and you’d still be above $9.99.
My point, if I have one, is just that before looking at these numbers I had no idea where I stood on the pricing issue. Now I know. To me, e-books should equal the cost of creating a story, with a sufficient profit for all involved. It’s why MacMillan had to play chicken with Amazon—if they didn’t, the idea that a story should only cost $9.99 would continue until all consumers believed it and would refuse to buy anything that actually represents the real price of entertainment, or culture.
__________________________
COINCIDENTALLY, the NYT ran a piece the day after I wrote this, on the same subject. It’s here. Choice excerpt:
Authors have been taken aback by some of the vehemence of the reader protests.
“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”
Amazon commenters attacked Mr. Preston after his publisher delayed the e-book version of his novel by four months to protect hardcover sales. Mr. Preston said he was not sure whether the protests were denting his sales. But, he said, “It gives me pause when I get 50 e-mails saying ‘I’m never buying one of your books ever again. I’m moving on, you greedy, greedy author.”
Back in October, as a gift-to-myself for getting the Dagger nomination, I bought a spankin’ new Amazon Kindle. Being a sucker for slick gadgets, I’d had a hankering for one for a while, but living in Europe made it useless until the international version came out. So I pulled out my credit card, choked my way through the exorbitant import fees, and waited for it.
And then my world changed…
No, not really. But I do have to admit that I’m liking it quite a lot. Right now, I’ve got over 200 books on the slender thing, and not just Gutenberg titles. I’m able to toss my own manuscripts on there, as well as friends’, and by using Calibre I’ve set up an automatic newspaper subscription that updates five major papers daily—for free.
Even with the hefty European import fees the economics of the thing work out, because, since I live in Europe (where the few local English-language bookstores can’t seem to track down all the books I want), my main source of books has always been Amazon. The titles I get there always cost more than the average $10 ebook price, and shipping costs more. The basic math is that if I buy 40 or so Kindle books, the Kindle will have paid for itself.
The real question, of course, is whether or not one likes reading on the Kindle. That first week I was unsure, but as the ads say, the Kindle really does quickly disappear in your hands, and you soon forget you’re using a machine. Right now I’m rereading Deighton’s Berlin Game on it for class, and it’s going wonderfully. The note-taking aspect (the chicklet keyboard) works well enough, but I’m not quite a convert to that yet, though the search function is terrific. And of course there’s the central problem of all ebooks: I can’t flip through a book to find something I want to cite. Overall, though, the thing really does its job and does it well.
Do I miss “the book” when I’m reading on this? In some ways, yes, but there’s an interesting effect that occurs, something that I think writers might notice more than others—one loses the fetish of the printed page. What I mean to say is that, while reading an ebook, content is absolute king. Not typography, not binding, not cover design—only the abstract words themselves. In this way, one could argue that it’s reading in its purest sense. I’ll admit that there’s certainly an electronica fetish with these things, but when each book looks exactly the same—since you’re reading them all on one machine—there’s no individuality to separate War and Peace from, say, Bridget Jones. It’s like reading all your novels in Word—without the characteristics of typography and design, text and story are all that matter.
Now, before buying it I heard a lot of opinions about the Kindle from friends, usually those who hadn’t ever touched one. The opinions ranged from skeptical to downright hostile. E-books, some believe, will ruin publishing. I don’t see how that could be true—if the public’s willing to pay $10 for a book that costs pretty much nothing to produce (I could turn a manuscript into an ebook on my laptop in five minutes), then all that publishers, authors and ebook-sellers have to do is figure out how to divide up all that green.
No, the tragedy isn’t for publishing; it’s for bookstores. If I don’t have to leave my house to buy a book, then what’s to happen to your local bookstore? It’s a tough question to answer, but it’s the same question that was posed when Amazon itself rose to prominence with their home-delivered bound books. It’s the same question that was asked when Barnes & Noble started taking over the country with their brick & mortars. In each case independents were hurt. Will ebooks be the thing that finally break the back of the independents completely?
I hope not, but I really don’t know. I do know that, at this point in my life, this is the most convenient, cost-effective, and easy way for me to access a lot of books. Not all books—I often run into the brick wall of a title I want not being available in electronic format—but enough of them so that I’ll be reading for years. For those not available for my machine, I do still have an overflowing bookshelf that could probably take on more titles, and I’ll certainly use it.
Perhaps I can mitigate the damage I’m causing by boycotting Amazon when it comes to those those physical books, and only buy them from my nearest independent. It might not save anybody, but it just might make me feel better…
I’ve been out of touch for a hella long time now, up in Leipzig too full of teaching (much more time-consuming than some may have you believe—particularly if you’re raising a 2-year-old at the same time) to write anything here, much less write a word of my next novel. Now, though, in Budapest for the holiday and with a few minutes to spare, I wanted to finally deliver that long-overdue report on how things are going at the University of Leipzig.
Despite some adjustment difficulties, Leipzig has turned out to be a lovely city—a wonderful walkable center, ideal public transport, polite, clean, and chock-full-of culture. I wish I had the time to get to know it better. And the teaching has been going very well. I now see why so many writers do it. That weekly connection to a room full of people carries with it a social exhilaration that the novelist’s life rarely affords. It doesn’t hurt that my students are by and large terrific, and interested in what we’re studying.
The Spy Novel has been interesting. I entered the classroom with pretty much no idea how to communicate my love for these books, but figured that it would become clear soon enough. I was right and wrong. After a few classes varying from successful to, at one point, a dismal failure full of long dreaded silences, a student raised her hand and asked if I’d be open to taking some pointers. Of course I would—anything, please. After class, seven students hung around and shared their wisdom.
The problem, particularly with that failed session, was that I’d assumed the book we’d read was so hot, so entertaining and thought-provoking, that everyone would have something to say (it is, after all, a seminar—not a lecture). The book was Greene’s The Quiet American, and I was completely wrong. The students found it slow and not very entertaining at all. Turns out none of them saw the humor in what I think is a book full of laugh-out-loud lines. Thanks to the students who stayed behind to lecture me, I learned that part of the problem was background—they just didn’t know what was going on when the book was taking place, and I hadn’t bothered to tell them. Whoops. Also, they suggested simple things, like using the board (oh, so that’s the big thing behind me) to write up characters’ names and themes and perhaps even plot outlines.
It wasn’t a long list of suggestions, just a few basics, but I’ve found they make all the difference. Even while reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy—a longtime fave of mine that, again, just baffled/bored them (only two out of 35 actually finished it)—I was able to use this small tool-set to work through the entire story, chapter-by-chapter, and (hopefully) shed some light on it.
By far the most appreciated book, interestingly enough, has been Charles McCarry’s brilliant The Miernik Dossier. It’s such a good novel, and it provoked some real discussion and excitement. Right now we’re halfway through Deighton’s Berlin Game, and in January and the first week of February we’ll look at Alan Furst’s Kingdom of Shadows and someone else’s The Tourist. Now, it wasn’t my plan to teach my own book, but on the first day the students told me it was a little disappointing that I wasn’t going to be discussing my own work, so I redrafted the syllabus—kicking out poor Ian Fleming and his From Russia With Love to make room for me and my ego.
The Collaborative Novel has been an entirely different beast. We have a much smaller group—10 students—and from the first day we began to write. Though I have tried a couple times, I don’t really lecture on aspects of writing—I would, but there’s no time. We meet once a week for 90 minutes—in that time we’re supposed to critique 3 chapters and then outline the three next chapters (now we’re up to 6 chapters or more at a time) while pitching ideas for the direction of the whole story. In fact, we’re usually critiquing until nearly the end of class and have no time to plan out the next chapters.
This, again, is my fault for not running things with an iron fist and a stopwatch, but it’s also a reflection of how the students have quickly become engaged in the project. Opinions lead to discussions which sometimes lead to arguments—all this because there’s a certain level of passion in this class, the understanding that this group endeavor means something to them. It’s a wonderful thing to be a part of. I hope they’re getting something out of it.
It’s not easy, of course. Getting ten people to agree on anything is a hassle, and we often resort to a quick vote to make decisions. Ten people means ten ideas of what a good story is and what good writing is. In this latter issue I try to be the tyrant, marking up first drafts with my militant “show don’t tell” and “don’t tell us what the reader already knows” rules. But there’s a deeper issue at work—the fact that a work of art is largely defined by a single person’s view of the world, something we can’t really do in our situation.
The story itself? Well, as I am with my own work, I’ll leave it a secret until it’s done. But it’s an interesting tale that has gradually moved into the realm of mystery/spy fiction (without my prodding, I swear!). We’re deep in the second act now, juggling five POVs (I sort of wish I’d put my foot down at the beginning and insisted on 1 or 2 POVs, but there you go), and with a lot of inconsistencies and loose ends we’re going to be hard-pressed to get straight before the end of the semester (the first week of February)—but I have a sneaking suspicion we’re going to make it.
Some other things have been happening since I last posted in September—I lost the Silver Dagger Award in London (among film & TV stars galore! what a way to lose), got myself a Kindle (which I’m quite digging), and dealt with the copyedits and page proofs of my next book, The Nearest Exit. Busy, busy. If I get a chance I’ll post some words on these other things, but in the meantime I hope you’re all getting revved up for a lovely holiday.
In about a week and a half, the family and I will be relocating north and west, to Leipzig, where I’ll begin something I’ve never done before: teaching. Two classes, The Collaborative Novel and The Spy Novel.
Given that the idea for The Collaborative Novel—a class in which everyone works together to write a single novel—came from David Liss, as soon as the school said it sounded good I contacted David and asked for his advice: How the hell does one organize such a thing? His answer? “I dunno.”
Well, he did have some ideas, in particular that the first phase would be outlining. This made sense, as David is an outliner. However, I’m not, and I finally decided that my continual interjections of, “Now, this isn’t how I write a novel” would become pretty tedious. So I’m keeping it simple. The first day we throw around ideas until we have some idea of our genre and an opening scene. Then, I go home and write a first chapter. We workshop it and think about the next few scenes. Students receive their chapter assignments. The important thing is that, throughout the semester we’ll continually reassess the story as a whole and leave ourselves open to rewriting anything. The act of reassessing should allow plenty of openings for discussions on the craft.
Though this leaves plenty of room for error, the fact is that the class is an experiment, and as such failure is always a possibility. I find I’m actually more concerned about The Spy Novel, a literature course. Not with the list. It’s not a comprehensive survey of the genre, really, just a collection of things I like that give a vague sense of the genre’s movement:
excerpts from Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham (1928)
A Coffin for Dimitrios/Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler (1939)
The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming (1957)
The Miernik Dossier (1973) by Charles McCarry
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre (1974)
Berlin Game by Len Deighton (1983)
Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst (2000)
