Some Thoughts on Creativity

I finally got my book in the hands of a reputable agency this week.


I’ve been writing fiction for the 8 years since I left grad school, and I’ve never had an agent to help me sell it; I’ve written three-and-a-half books, four screenplays, dozens of poems, at least one short story, and 99 product reviews. The product reviews are on Amazon, and I sold or gave away somewhere south of 200 copies of the second book (which I self-published through a publish-on-demand company), so the writing’s never come remotely close to paying the bills. But this has the potential to change all that, or so I tell myself. Anyway, I’m pretty excited to at least be getting it out there.

I’m not sure if the bookselling tribulations are my fault or the industry’s fault, or if they’re a bad thing, even; since I haven’t had any deadline pressures in all that time, I’ve had the freedom to spend as long as I’ve wanted on my various projects. (I started writing Resistance, for instance, in January of 2006; at first I wrote it as two screenplays, and I spent a little time on some other screenplays that year, but then I started on the manuscript in November of that year, and I worked on it for about the next two-and-a-half years.) At any rate, I’ve been free to revise and do additional research at my leisure.

The problem with that is that it’s easy to get to this point where you’re not actually getting the writing in front of readers. (I generally love writing for its own sake, but unless someone reads it and reacts to it, I am not sure there’s a point; it becomes one of those “What’s the sound of one hand clapping” things. But that’s not the fault of the would-be-readers—I sometimes spend an overly long time revising and polishing stuff rather than just getting it out there. Friends and family have asked me about the latest book, but I haven’t let any of them read it yet.)

Creativity’s a bitch these days. (Assuming I’m creative; I sometimes wonder.) On one hand, it’s easier to be creative and get the products of your labor out there for other people to check out; on the other hand, there’s such a glut of creative products on the market that it’s probably harder than ever to get noticed. And that, I’ve come to realize, is the real test; as Greg Kot pointed out in Ripped, his excellent chronicle of the demise of the music industry, the true test isn’t getting people to buy stuff—it’s getting them to listen to it or pay attention to it in the first place. The bands that are illegally downloaded most frequently are also the ones whose music sells the most; the ones that can’t sell their music can’t give it away, either. So I’m another bit player in an oversaturated market; sometimes when I go to Borders, I wonder if I will ever be able to get something on those shelves and keep it there for any length of time; I feel overwhelmed at the number of excellent books already on the market, and curious as to whether I can carve out a niche in that large enough to live in.

I can’t really complain, though; again, I really enjoy writing, and my day job’s paying the bills, so it’s not like I’m a starving artist. And more importantly, I’m hardly alone in this situation. Indeed, a rather large number of my friends have creative side projects—improv shows and bands and photography collections and sculpture exhibitions and things of that sort. I almost wonder if it’s one of the hallmarks of my generation that we’re starry-eyed dreamers, perpetually working on our side projects and dreaming of the day they’ll pay off rather than just doing what our parents did, buckling down and starting families and finding contentment (or resentment) in the normal Cat’s-in-the-Cradle progression of human life instead of the creative process.

(Actually, it’s kind of egotistical to say that; starting a family is a creative process, in the most literal sense. Like the intellectual creative process, people embark on it for both selfish and selfless reasons, but it is obviously far more necessary for the world-at-large. And yet, people are embarking on it—at least in the Western world—later on average than at any time in human history. Is that because a lot of us prefer the type of creativity where we can be perfect, at least in our own minds? I don’t know.)

I digress. It’s the artistic creative process that I’m involved in, and I owe it to myself to at least see it through. I’m excited about my book, but I’ve been working on it so long that it’s hard to tell whether or not it’s any good; like a parent with a child, it’s impossible for me to see it with unbiased eyes. If it’s good, and if it deserves a place on the shelves at Borders, I have to trust that it will find its way there one way or another, in God’s time. And if it’s not good, I need to find that out, too, so I can at least get on with my life, and perhaps move on to the other type of creativity rather than spending my time writing alone in coffee shops, as I’m doing now.

And I need to remind myself that can’t do this process alone any more than I would be able to have children on my own. (I thought I could do it all myself when I wrote Pottersville; I did the publish-on-demand thing in the hopes that I’d get the book out there and it would become this huge viral hit and eventually sell itself. I think I just didn’t want to do the work or face the rejection, though; I’d queried a lot of agencies without luck while writing the previous book, and so I didn’t even bother doing that with Pottersville until I’d already published it, at which point no self-respecting agency was willing to touch it. Anyway, I eventually got tired of giving my book pitch at every social function I went to, tired of deciding whether or not I felt like being a salesman that day or not. My brother-in-law actually ended up selling a lot more copies than I did. Granted, he’s a far better salesman than I’ve ever been, the type that could, as Jay-Z said, sell water to a whale, or fire in hell.)

ANYWAY, I digress, again. I need help selling the book, and hopefully I’m finding it at last, so I need to wait patiently and see what happens, and look for happiness not in the imagined outcome, but in the simple process of taking constructive action and leaving the results in God’s hands.

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The National

Granted, the website's in Norwegian, but this is a badass concert performance by The National, one of the best bands in America these days. My birthday present to you. (Formerly Nick B's birthday present to me!)

Strategic Book Publishing

I was briefly excited about selling the book last week.


Usually I haven’t been excited about selling it; usually when I’m home, I’m a lot more likely to be hiding from it, and hiding from the rest of my life, on facebook.

Then, somewhere in between all the commenting and the relentless rounds of Mafia Wars, I noticed an ad on facebook from a literary agency that was accepting submissions.

“Perfect,” I thought. “I will barely have to do anything.”

I clicked on the link and completed a submission form outlining the project, making sure to correct an earlier error, where, ironically enough, I’d left out the apostrophe in “Master’s Degree in Journalism.” My bio and descriptions of the project were tight, and they felt right. As for the agency, its website announced it as the “Strategic Book Publishing.” The site wasn’t super-high-gloss, but it had three things going for it: author testimonials, an emphatic declaration that this was not a self-publishing company, and promised results, including the Holy Grail: placement on bookstore shelves nationwide. It felt like cosmic validation of my laziness and reluctance to query literary agents. “You were right not to send out query letters,” the universe was saying. “That reeks of desperation. Let the agents come to you.”

I clicked on the “Submit” button and awaited their reply.

“Please be patient,” the site had advised. “We receive a high volume of submissions, but we are committed to answering all of them promptly, so we will get back to you within 48 to 72 hours.”

That’s lightning-quick in publishing terms, one of those Jimmy John’s So-Fast-You’ll-Freak things. But sure enough, they answered; moreover, they were interested in forwarding me on to an affiliated publishing group, which, they said, would most likely want to take a look at my manuscript.

This seemed a little odd; I would have thought they’d want to shop it around and try and get the best deal first. But I again awaited their reply, and I was again rewarded with a response within the promised timeframe.

This sounded delightful, and so much better than any agency I’d ever dealt with. “Screw you, established literary agencies,” I found myself thinking. “You’re gatekeepers of a dying kingdom. Strategic Book Publishing and I are going to ride roughshod over you, and conquer the world! Their promptness and attentiveness have won them the right to represent my manuscript. And it will sell so many copies that you will all weep; meanwhile I will sleep on a massive stack of money for the rest of my life.”

I got an email from them asking for the manuscript.

Here I did get a little nervous. “Are they big enough?” I found myself asking. “Can they handle a manuscript this awesome?” They promised that they did not pick up authors unless there was a clear path to selling 5,000 books; that didn’t sound like a lot, compared to my ambitions. But it was about 20 times as many as my previous (admittedly, self-published) book, Pottersville. (I’d had massive ambitions for that book. People liked it, but it didn’t sell well, and at this point, I would cheerfully accept if someone offered to pay me minimum wage for all the hours I spent working on it; that might, if I was charitable about my time estimates, net me in the high four figures.) Anyway, that was that book, though, and this was this. And given the confidence I’ve occasionally had in this manuscript, I figured it’s bound to sell a lot more. “This book is about Nazis,” I told myself. “Books about Nazis sell.”

Again, I asked myself, “Are they big enough?”

“Fuck it,” I thought. “This book will MAKE THEM big enough.”

Just to be on the safe side, I put my real name on the cover, and I included a copyright notice. And then I sent it off.

Only then did I remember that I’d meant to do some independent research on this company. Being a graduate of one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country, I figured I’d better put my investigative skills to use.

I typed “Strategic Book Publishing” in the Google search bar. The FIRST result that came up was “strategic book publishing scam.” (Even before plain ol’ “strategic book publishing.”)

A few quick link clicks and I was enlightened as to their M.O., which you can read about at the bottom of the page here, and about its owner's current legal troubles here. (If you’re lazier than I am, suffice it to say that Strategic Book Publishing seems to be a front for an octopus-like conglomeration of relatively phony agencies and publishers controlled by some scammer dude down in Florida. Basically, it seems they’re one of those pseudo-agencies that charges people for copyediting and reading fees and what-not and then never actually, you know, sells your book.)

Anyway, it’s back to the drawing board, older and wiser and what-not. And if I ever get lonely during the next round of queries, I can always re-read their latest email and remind myself that someone wants me.

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