Los
Angeles continues to astound me in its diversity of experience. Last
month, our niece, quiet, unassuming, shy, and sixteen, called to say she was in
the Miss Norco Beauty Pageant, and could we come? The only thing odder
might be Bruce Springsteen calling to ask did I like his new album, and could
we join him at Gus’s Barbecue in South Pasadena for ribs?
Our
niece, I’ll call her Heather for this, is a great kid, just incredibly
shy. The few times we’ve been to
restaurants with her, she could barely voice to the waitress what she wanted to
eat out of fear she was doing something wrong.
When I heard she’d be in a beauty contest, questions that immediately
sprang to my mind for her:
--In
this contest, do you have to talk?
--Do
you have to wear more than jeans and a t-shirt?
--Do
you have to be in front of people?
The
previous year, when she and her family moved to Norco, we did ask,
“Norco? Is that a corporation or a washing machine?” Norco was first merely a nickname for a
14-square-mile area north of Corona.
It's far south on the I-15 in western Riverside County, and the town
slogan is, "Horsetown USA." Instead of bike paths, there are
horse paths. Many stores are done up like a new Old West town--the
Wild West via Disney for middle-class folk. Used Suburbans, weary
horses. (It’s hot down there.)
From
the Internet I learned that in the late 1920s in Norco, a huge resort was
built, the Norconian Club: 900-acres that had a huge lake, a casino,
Olympic-sized pools, mineral baths, a golf course, a landing field, and
more. It was meant for an escape for
movie stars, but eight months after it opened, the Great Depression slammed
down, and the facility was abandoned.
The federal government came to own much of this resort, turning part of
it in 1962 into a correctional facility for narcotics offenders. Narco in Norco.
So
Ann and I went to the Miss Norco Beauty Pageant, now in its 57th
year. It was at the Norco County Fair,
a dusty few acres of land with hurricane fencing. Add a few
quick-build rides, a Ferris wheel, and a lot of food stands, including one
for bacon-wrapped hot dogs, and you have the fairgrounds on a stick.
The
beauty contest was in the little outdoor arena where sheep shearing probably
happened, too. The front rows were
reserved for visiting "royalty," girls who won other beauty
contests. I saw Miss Route 66, Miss County of Riverside, and Miss
Inland Empire among others. They all wore pink or blue gowns suitable for
a cousin's wedding, and topped off with a crown as good as the 99-Cent Store
sells. A couple crowns had swans on them. Next to me on the aluminum bench sat a woman who looked old
enough to have been to all the previous fifty-six competitions. “Have you been to many of these?” I asked
her.
“Oh,
yes,” she laughed, hitting the knee of her daughter in her fifties next to
her. “I like these,” said the old
woman. “In the early years, it was
around a swimming pool. I rather liked
that. There was a swimming suit
competition then, too. They did a way
with that—what a shame.”
“What
do they have now?” I asked.
“Sportswear,”
she said as if it were a round chalky substance like Tums.
It
was near eight p.m. when the emcee, Mayor Kathy Azevedo, in khaki pants
and a short-sleeved shirt handed out beautification awards. I thought at first it had to do with the
young women we were to see, but no, one award went to a gas station near the
freeway that prettified itself. I
pictured a pyramid of old used tires being carted away. A few other awards went to homes that, according
to my elderly neighbor on the bench, got awards because they were eyesores
before.
The mayor announced, “We’re not like Corona, next to us,
which has over 150,000 residents now.
We’re Horsetown USA.” It made it
sound as if Norco wouldn’t grow, but this was still Greater L.A. Of course it’ll grow. In a few years, horses will be replaced
with horse statues and horse billboards and horse posters, making everyone feel
as if horses were still around. Maybe
they’ll install a merry-go-round with great wooden horses. Heck, I went to school in Hopkins,
Minnesota, raspberry capital of America, long after the last raspberry farm
left the county. Hopkins still has a
raspberry parade. I know about these
things.
After thanking a few sponsors, the mayor soon added, “Now
you have to wait a little bit because I have to go get on my gown. I’m in charge of the Miss Norco contest,
too.” I realized in that instant where
Garrison Keillor got a lot of his patter for Prairie Home Companion. He’d been to events like this.
The
natives were getting restless. People
dashed out and returned with giant lemonades and hot dogs wrapped in
bacon. The royalty in the front were
standing up, sitting down, standing up, as if they heard silent music.
The
lights finally came on again onstage, and all sixteen contestants, young women
whose ages ranged from sixteen to twenty-three, strode out through a giant
silver horseshoe that featured the words, “Dreams Do Come True.” The stage was otherwise blank, and the women
pranced around to an Abba-like tune.
While it was hokey as heck, I was cheering. There was our niece! My,
she’d grown taller in the last year, filled out, and her long naturally blond
kinky hair shone like Rapunzel’s in the stage lights.
“What
happened to her frumpy glasses?” I asked my wife.
“Contacts,”
she said.
When
the girls had to go change, the mayor talked about small improvements on Sixth
Street. “B&E Feed is lookin’
good—it’s America’s country store.”
Next came the sportwear showing.
All the girls wore the same thing: a black skirt with a large
curtain-like blouse in either white or maroon, which hung loosely and
lifelessly, apparent rejects from Project Runway. Oddly, the teenage girls entering from the
food court seemed to be drawing more attention, what with their skimpy
halter-tops and short shorts and grinning boyfriends who looked like dogs with
a found steak.
When
each contestant had to speak, I became nervous. Would Heather faint?
No. She walked out assuredly in
heels, dark pants and a red blouse and scanned the audience proudly. She smiled grandly and began with a few
phrases in German, showing off the language she was learning in high
school. She spoke affectionately of
Norco and of her three younger siblings, and her quest for a good education.
Her microphone cut out. Oh, oh, I
thought. Was this sabotage? She simply spoke louder, keeping her
cool. When and how did she become so
eloquent and self-assured?
My
cell phone vibrated. It was news of a
friend having a gallstone attack and being rushed to the hospital—we’d have to
leave early. While we didn’t see the
ending of the show, we left damn impressed.
While Heather did not go on to
win the crown, I knew even before the outcome she'd won something far more
valuable: an attitude that showed she could perform with grace under
pressure. And as Ann and
I bounced out of the bumpy dirt parking lot, and I gazed at the moon rising
over the hill, I thought, "Norco. Not a bad place."
Ms. Kerry Slattery, owner
of Skylight Books in Los Feliz (1818 N. Vermont Avenue, next to the movie
theatre) agreed to meet me even though I had not arranged it. I had, however, sent her my book with
several of its reviews, and she remembered that when a sales clerk announced
me. I climbed the stairs to her
office. The skylight above her gave a
gentle light and made her look angelic as she stood and shook my hand. She was a little older than I and
smiled. “I’ve never seen a
print-on-demand book as yours get so much attention,” she said. “Congratulations to you.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I
explained how I’d been in publishing years ago. I knew to hire an editor and book designer and not rush into
print. She offered a chair, reached
over to a second desk where The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea rested and
picked it up. The reviews stuck out
from it, and she glanced at them again.
“Impressive,” she said. “Most
books I get directly from authors have no reviews, and the authors expect me to
arrange a big display for them and a book signing, and it just doesn’t work
that way.”
“I haven’t wanted any book
signings,” I said, “because I’ve been in stores where the author is signing and
no one is there. That’s so sad to
me. Unless you’re well known, people
don’t come.”
“Exactly,” she said. “You understand the book business. This is a small neighborhood, and people
don’t pour out for most signings. They
really need a reason to come. Too many
authors don’t realize this, and some get mad when I don’t agree to it. They can also get mad if their book’s on a
shelf, spine out—but we only have so much space near the book register. Only so many books can be displayed. The best way for display is when a sales
clerk loves your book, and it goes into the ‘favorites’ area up front.”
She also said she feels
that many full-serve print-on-demand companies such as Xlibris and
PublishAmerica mislead, saying that by getting an ISBN number, the books can be
in bookstores. Yes, they can be special
ordered by bookstores, but that only happens if a customer asks for it. Some companies promise mailings to
bookstores, so bookstores can stock the book.
“When I see an
announcement from them,” she said, “it goes into the wastebasket. There are so few good titles, and
print-on-demand books cannot be returned.
Normally with my distributors, if a book seems interesting, I might take
a chance and order a few copies. If
they don’t sell in three or four months, I can send them back for a
refund. I can’t do that with
print-on-demand. What I order, I have
to keep. You have to realize, too, that
most books are on shelves, spine out.
It’s up to the customer to find them or a sales clerk to recommend
them.”
I saw, too, that although
book buying on the web, such as from Amazon.com and BN.com, is growing, it is
the bookstores that make the biggest difference. Traditional publishers understand this, which is why they have
sales people and relationships with as many bookstores as they can. They encourage bookstores to take a chance
by taking books back if they don’t sell.
I can’t be going to each store across America individually as I was doing
with Skylight. There are 3,200
independent bookstores like Skylight—the breeding ground of literature. (Down from 7,000 in the seventies.) There are another 5,000 or so chain
bookstores.
Pod Girl, the anonymous
reviewer at PODdy Mouth where my book is still recommended, made a point
after the Entertainment Weekly article came out that five of us were
selling better than she was at Amazon (see http://tinyurl.com/kqt5v), but she continues to sell steadily through her
publisher, Penguin, while we’re back in obscurity. I’m not complaining but simply pointing out how the book business
works.
Pod Girl, by the way,
explains more of the POD/traditional publisher differences in a great interview
at http://tinyurl.com/okjrl. Read
it if you’re contemplating taking the route I’ve gone.
As I also explained to
Kerry, I knew short story collections are similar to poetry collections: people
stay away in droves. Hence, for me, by
going print-on-demand, my collection came out the way I wanted, and my short
stories can remain in print for a long time.
When my novel, The Laughter and Sadness of Sex, comes out through
a traditional publisher (no news yet), and assuming people find my novel, read
it, and like it, they may discover my short stories. This is my long-term plan.
Presently, I’m in awe of how much attention my collection has received
so far—perhaps far more than if I’d gone with a small literary publisher out of
Minnesota.
Kerry said she’d like to
carry my book—words I was hoping to hear—and she would start with three copies
“to test the waters.” Thus, those of
you who live in Los Angeles, if you recommend my book to anyone, you can also
say that Skylight Books in Los Feliz carries it—as does Barnes & Nobel in
Pasadena and Borders in Valencia.
Skylight is also on the web at www.skylightbooks.com.
Thank you to all of you
who have bought my book. The book
business is not one where most authors ever get rich. Writers have to pursue it because they love the medium.
THE EASY ROAD TO
SUCCESS (SIC)
Much about being a writer
is about being rejected. From day
one. The first stories you write aren’t
quite right says your teacher or workshop.
You work hard at improving it and yourself. Finally one day, after encouragement here and there and “the idea
is good,” you write a story that people like.
You now try getting it published, and you receive back little sheets of
paper no larger than a gum wrapper.
They say, “We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed
material. Thank you for giving us the
opportunity to consider it.”
You send many stories out,
trying different approaches in your cover letters, and, over time your receive
many rejections back. You feel as
worthy as an amoeba. At last someone
accepts a story. You are published. You might repeat the process many times for
several stories, collecting enough rejections to make a phone book for
losers. You also get the occasional
acceptance, until you have a number of published stories. Some people admire you.
At some point you move
onto writing a book manuscript and seeking an agent, and you get many little
slips of paper back in rejection. One
day someone says yes. An agent likes
your book, and offers you a contract.
She submits your manuscript to publishers, and she gets rejections on
your behalf. While rejections are like
mosquitoes seeking your blood, an agent acts like Off! repellant. The mosquitoes still come, but they don’t
break through your skin.
Let’s say your manuscript
gets published and you land a big publisher, and now it’s time for
publicity. Or let’s say it doesn’t get
published, so you publish it yourself using a print-on-demand (POD) service,
and now it’s time for publicity.
Whatever way you arrived
at having a book, it’s time to shout about it to the world. Publicity, too, is all about rejection. If you write a press release or send out
cheerful e-mails, most people won’t care.
Your missives dive into the trash.
This story is about how my
book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, happened to be
in Entertainment Weekly last month as one of five recommended
books. I heard about it when a fellow
writer and friend wrote me, “Did you see your book cover and that fab
notice about your book in Entertainment Weekly, the publication all
writers would KILL to get into? They said your book was one of the few POD that
were wonderful and they included this incredible rave blurb about it!!!
Go get it, print it out, and use it for your next book! This is so wonderful I
am hyperventilating!”
It’s all about
perseverance in the onslaught of rejection.
For my novel The Laughter and Sadness of Sex, I have an agent
(who is getting rejections as I write.
Ah—another one has just come in.)
For my collection of short fiction, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, I
decided to go POD because my stories would always be in print. (To read more about why or why not go POD
and what it’s about, read http://tinyurl.com/kkgz5)
When it comes to
collections of short fiction, who buys them?
To quote Samuel Goldwyn, “They stayed away in droves.” Nonetheless, I’m quixotic, and I decided to
publish my short stories that were published over the years in literary
journals.
For this collection, I
needed publicity. Publicity is really
about sending yourself out there in little doses and seeing what sticks. Inspired by Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s The
Frugal Book Promoter, I wrote media releases and sent them out hoping to
get requests for more information. I
sent my book unsolicited to reviewers at newspapers and heard nothing
back. One day, I opened the Los
Angeles Times and saw my book reviewed, and quite favorably. That made one review for thirty books I’d
sent out—but it was an important review.
It was worth the cost of those thirty books.
I also kept my eye open
for places to send books or releases, and early in 2006, I read about a popular
website called POD-dy Mouth, where an anonymous woman reviewed the best POD
books she could find. I contacted her,
and she agreed to consider my book.
Three months later, I received an e-mail from her praising my book and
saying it’s the first POD book of 2006 that she could recommend on her
website. She wrote an incredible review
of it (which you can see at http://tinyurl.com/eo9ck). It’s
now September, and she’s considered hundreds of books more and can only
recommend seven.
Entertainment Weekly found her website (http://girlondemand.blogspot.com)
and touted it as “Best of the Web” and highlighted five books she
recommended. Mine is one of the
five. Thus I was in Entertainment
Weekly.
All it all, it’s about
striving for quality, trying things from new angles after getting rejected, and
seeing that magic sometimes happens. If
you can get rejected, you may find acceptance.
(Speaking about
acceptance, thank you to Joyce Faulkner, who suggested the above article, and
she ran it in her wonderful publication, Yarnspinners and Wordweavers, a
newsletter on independent publishing.
You can see the latest issue of hers at www.redenginepress.com/Newsletter1.pdf. If you’d like it
e-mailed to you each month, send a note to Nate@redenginepress.com.)
HOW
THE BOOK INDUSTRY WORKS
I
stumbled onto a blog by the Publishing Contrarian that explains why some books
take off more than others. Basically,
everything is a niche market now, and books that happen to be about a special
group get found by those groups. Go to:
http://tinyurl.com/mdpd6
Last minute news: the Midwest
Book Review in its September slate of reviews gave The Middle-Aged Man
and the Sea a Small Book Watch Reviewer's Choice review. It said in part, “Meeks'
writing style is characterized by an ability to create identifiable characters
that will hold a haunting familiarity for the reader, along with imaginative
but realistic and original scenarios which play out succinctly in the short
fiction format. The Middle-Aged Man & The Sea is highly recommended,
highly entertaining, and highly rewarding reading.” The Midwest Book Review uploaded the entire review onto
Amazon.com, which you can read at http://tinyurl.com/re8o6. Just scroll down beyond Grady Harp’s fabulous
spotlight review.
I heard from a number of
people last month last a few of the links I posted didn’t work. I learned that was because the link
addresses were so long that when they went beyond one line, the line break
caused the link not to work. One reader
(thank you Daniel Will-Harris—see his beautiful website, www.will-harris.com) told me about www.tinyurl.com. It’s a free site that takes
long addresses and makes them short for you—perfect for emails as well as
newsletters like this.
One link that didn’t work
last month was the blog about the Entertainment Weekly article. It’s now in this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/fvscp.
Leaving CalArts after my Advanced
Story for Animators class last week, I ran into Luis Alfaro, who had
been a fellow artistic member and playwright in Playwrights Arena with me. He teaches playwriting at CalArts in a
graduate program in the School of Theater.
Luis’ play Electricidad, based on Sophocles’ Electra, was
produced at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles last year, where he
headed the Latino Theatre Lab, and before that I saw his play Bitter Homes
and Gardens at Playwrights Arena.
He’s also been a recipient of a MacArthur genius grant.
A most charming and
outgoing person, Luis told me he had been hired to adapt Jane Austen’s Sense
and Sensibility to a modern Los Angeles setting. He did so: a wealthy family living in San Marino loses all when
the husband dies, and through a series of events, they end up living near
low-rent downtown. Huntington Drive is
the link between the two. I lived that
link five years ago when my girlfriend, now my wife, Ann, lived in Temple City
and I lived in Culver City. The fastest
way between the two places during rush hour was Huntington Drive. The riches of San Marino to the varying
fortunes of Lincoln Heights is only about five miles. I was so stunned by the diversity of the drive, I had created a
photo essay for myself. There’s a ten-block
stretch where the transition is most profound from rich to poor.
Luis’s script will start
shooting next month, directed by Fina Torres (Leap of Love), and
produced by the same company that brought us Garden State.
I also heard from fellow UCLA Extension instructor and humorist Brad
Schreiber that he has a new book out, Stop the Show! A History of Insane Incidents and Absurd
Accidents in Theatre (Thunder’s Mouth Press, Sept. 2006 ISBN: 1560258209). As he explains it, the book “revels in ruined lines, dangerous scenery, rude
theatergoers, performers sabotaging each other and more--from the West End and
Broadway to the lowliest amateur theater.”
One example is an April Fool's Day announcement in a Broadway
theatre that claimed Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfus, and Gene Hackman all had
understudies going on for them, which created a mass exodus from the theatre
before the audience could learn it was a joke.
Bravo to Luis and Brad.