Chekhov’s Mistess

All This Useless Beauty: Judging a (free) Book by its Cover

The Purge Pile – A Cynic’s Paradise

I recently threw out at least 90% of the free books I’ve freely received over the past year, but not without some consideration. I imagined what it must be like for the readers at review outlets who spend an awful lot of time doing this – throwing out books, that is. The idea that the book in my hands was chosen from millions of hopefuls to be published (then went through a process of editing, art, and marketing) kept passing through my head, though often with incredulity.

That said, my methodology was of the highest order: Generally speaking a brightly colored or pastel cover hit the out-pile immediately. There were many of these. And then the red books. Red means different things depending on the context: On a flag, red typically symbolizes the blood shed for that country’s heritage or independence. On a church door, it means welcome; on a book cover it usually means sex. American Psycho ruined me for sex in novels.

Books where the cover art completely overshadows the author’s name can easily be tossed. Names hidden in the art seem to indicate that you won’t recognize the author but you should read this book because its cover is suggestive of “X,” of which this is one of countless followers because X is in its fifth printing. The opposite of tiny authorial recognition is where the author’s name completely dwarfs any cover art, in which case the cover would typically be split half and half, author’s name embossed-like on top and some evocative (of something sinister) image on the bottom half. Here we have our themed or series of books usually found in airports.

Those left do get a bit of cover art scrutiny. The one suggestive of dead babies got chucked. All the ones with darkly blurred pictures of exotic women or their appendages had little chance, as well as the ones with slutty-looking high-heeled shoes.

Next line of defense were the blurbs, but I went through that part of my methodology in the last post. Few books were saved through their blurbs, although I do recognize that as a factor.

A few books get their covers opened. The first of those to go are novels that begin like this: “It’s late spring, our junior year at Yale…” which sends me instantly to the author bio on the jacket cover that inevitably begins “Author So AndSo graduated from Yale in…” Not that there’s anything wrong with writing what you know – that is what they teach you, I imagine – but really.

To be fair, I opened this particular book to a random page and read it. This is what I found:

“It took every vestige of strength in David Laytnor’s body to stand still without scratching himself or shaking violently. He had forgotten what real pain felt like, even though he had spent four years at Yale running himself through various thresholds of it. So far in David Laytnor’s relatively young life there had been nothing to compare with this. And the worst part was that Samona wanted him. She had been away too long without him. She told him she was getting wet just standing there. She wanted to make love. Now.”

Some of the most dull writing I’ve come across. I changed the name of the character and I won’t say who the author is, there’s no sense in that, but this is blowing my theory of judging a book by it’s cover because the cover of this book was better than what’s inside (believe me, I looked around more before I wrote this).

Sometimes I’m surprised by some book that I never would have given thought to otherwise. That is the idea behind all these freebies coming my way, isn’t it?

Take this first novel from Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts.

The rain came down so hard it had real weight, beating my head and shoulders in a flinch, pouring heavy over my waterlogged clothes streaming in flukes from my hood and from my elbows and from the bottom of my coat. Hard, heavy roaring and angry. It was difficult to see. I brought a hand up to shield my eyes but this created a new shelf and a flow of fresh rivulets were soon throw-twisting themselves off the ends of my fingers and curling their way under the hood to run down my cheeks and chin. I struggled to blink away as much water as I could.

Then I saw what was out there, and it staggered me.

God, my lips said. The word was stillborn and tiny and bundled away in a sweep of the gale.

Whatever you think of this writing, it’s not dull. In fact, I think it’s good. I like the use of “flinch” and “flukes” and it has momentum, and unlike the previous example, it’s not trite.

This whole exercise is precipitated by the idea that there are gems in there, and they do exist, but that leads me to the next topic:

“I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman…”

The day I wrote here that I only received a trickle of free books – my wife laughed at this assertion – I received four in the mail. Still, it’s true, only a trickle compared to what a professional critic receives.

Surely though I must seem ungrateful about all these books coming my way. ‘Aye, the wee bit of a blogger-man gets free books in the mail and gushes over his market power,’ you say. Perhaps.

I met a publicist once who told me in the most condescending manner how they send books to the blog-people and how thrilled they – the blog-people – are with this great bestowment (my words, her meaning). Fortunately, they – the publicists – are not all like that, and in fact some have embraced blogs from a far more intuitive place than a this-is-the-latest-thing-pimp-the-bloggers-send-em-everything-we-got perspective.

But here’s part of the problem. The first problem is – obvious by the above – that truckloads of books are mailed every day to people without any attempt at determining if the recipient is even boy or girl ( ref. Secrets of a Former Fat Girl: How to Drop Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes – and Find Yourself Along the Way ), much less even remotely a candidate for connecting with that book. That’s not just a blogger problem, but an observation from this industry outsider ^†.

The other problem, related to the first, is that the few publicists who do get it hit the blogs with the same books such that I bet at least half of the books I just threw away also went to a bunch of people I know. In fact, we blog-people have sometimes shared emails we get when someone is on a blog-marketing campaign and those personal notes – “Dear Bud, I so love what you are doing at Chekhov’s Mistress, you’re such a great writer” – no longer seem so personal.

Very often I will get a book that may have some interest for me. Then suddenly, I see reviews of that very book popping up all over the bloggernet. Surely that’s great for the booksellers, but it’s a turn-off to me because it feels a bit too spoon-fed. I don’t mean to question the integrity of those writing the reviews, but reading that book with the care that it takes to write about it (for instance, I took 25 pages of notes on a recent read) becomes fairly well pointless to me for one thing, and for another I believe that discovery or the perspective one needs to review a book comes from casting a much wider net than what happens – due to some smart publicist – to fall in your lap.

This, I realize, is a subtle issue because I’m not against any free books or the publishing industry’s embrace of blogs, as dissolute as that bear-hug may be at times. Nor am I against bloggers writing about books and I know that many do cast a wider view of books than those coming to them from publicists. The issue of whether or not bloggers should acknowledge to their readers whether or not a book came from a publisher has already been hashed out, so I won’t again here. I’ve been mentioning books I’ve gotten from publishers, but only those that I have a relationship more than as a potential reviewer.

So here you have my embarrassment of riches; my introduction to the book business; childlike disappointment when getting yet another yellow envelope meant really for someone else; finger-waving blog-people advocacy; astonishment at the forest felling partially my fault; and tacit acknowledgment of the sheer silliness that my writing here has anything to do with any sort of so-called cultural conversation, much less the publishing business.

Because I like to end on a bright spot, I will tell you the story of a publisher who sent me a note and a book. She knows my taste and clearly sent me the book because she thought I might connect with it. It made my day. The point is that the book industry doesn’t seem to understand that blogs are just a great way to hand-sell books to people who care and will probably tell their friends; lots of friends. It’s the hand-selling that matters though.

^† _{Not entirely an outsider. I build Websites for publishers and authors and I come in contact with publishers through an ad network I run called brainiads.}

comments

This is interesting.

Thanks for sharing.

Jim Somchai

    – Jim Somchai (05/10  at  06:41 PM)

If only Calvin would just get it together and invent a teleportation device to go with his transmogrifier, you could send a stack to me.

(My plight is the exact opposite of yours.  I’ve even contemplated purchasing the Sony Reader so I can download books to read.  I’ll wait for the price to go down a bit first, though.)

    – amcorrea (05/11  at  01:55 PM)

Bloggers organizations can expand audiences, coordinate posting of similar titles, and advise audience sale decision I guess. How?

The Hood Company

    – Brian Hadd (05/11  at  03:12 PM)

I also marvel at the process by which books are published and make their way to my door. Some publishers ask first others just send them along. My darkest moment was buying a book at a library sale that I donated to them a few months earlier.

    – David Thayer (05/17  at  10:58 AM)

I’m sure an opshop would be delighted to take some of those, Bud. It sounds a bit sad to be throwing all of them away.

Also if you are getting a lot of books that are inappropriately targetted, couldn’t you put them back in the mail, marked NOT AT THIS ADDRESS? Then they will think twice about sending you more of same.

    – genevieve (05/20  at  08:36 PM)

Sorry Genevieve, I didn’t mean this to be a literal story about the books, but more about my amazement that all these books are being sent to me and my puppy dog sadness when I get that envelope in the mail and find it’s not the bone I wanted.

AM - I do think that it would be great if the Apple Reader (okay, so that one doesn’t exist yet) were the preferred form of distribution. Think of all the trees that could be saved.

    – Bud Parr (05/21  at  08:52 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 10, 2007
• Filed Under:
  You're Nobody Until Somebody Loves You: Publishing

• Comments:6
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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