I mean, a copy of MultiReal is literally sitting in my lap as I type this. The stack of my author copies is sitting on the ottoman in my living room right now, as this photo here can attest. They were waiting for me, all tidy and snuggling in a box of styrofoam peanuts when I got home from work.

The book’s so hot off the printer, you could make pancakes on it. It’s so slick, those pancakes would slide right off the book cover without leaving a trace. And I feel so sweet, I wouldn’t need any syrup. (Anybody else suddenly in the mood for an IHOP run…?)

My first thought on opening the box was wondering how long it’s going to be before men can have children, like Arnold Schwarzeneggar in that stupid movie or that weird George Michael-looking dude on Oprah. Because seeing the cover of MultiReal with this fabu Stephan Martiniere artwork, I was struck by a sudden urge to bear the man’s children. Really, it’s that good. It’s also a little darker on laminated cardboard than it is on a computer screen, which somehow seems to lend the book a bit of gravitas.

My second impression, just as I had when I saw the finished trade paperback of Infoquake for the first time, was that the book is both taller and thinner than I had imagined it would be. I found myself holding the book up and pinching the entire section 5 (called “Possibilities 2.0″) between my thumb and index finger. It’s 70 pages packed full of intrigue, drama, and intellectual stimulation, yet it’s about the thickness of an issue of Playbill. How can that be?

Once I’d gotten over staring at the book in isolation, of course the next thing I had to do was stack it next to both versions of Infoquake. As you can imagine, the Solaris Infoquake with the complementary Martiniere painting looks super keen next to MultiReal. But what was totally surprising to me was how well the Pyr trade paperback with the original cover looks side-by-side with the new book 2. Witness:

(Yes, I did take those photos myself on my cell phone. Sorry, Annie Leibowitz isn’t returning my calls anymore, that minx.)

So I now officially have two published books to my name, and I’m feeling as high as a zeppelin right this moment. Hey, lookit me! I’ve got an oeuvre!

In addition to thanking Stephan Martiniere for the fabulous cover, special mention should also go to my editor, Lou Anders, whose fabulous instincts are what make Pyr books look as special as they do. Also at Pyr/Prometheus, Jackie Cooke, who is responsible for the marvelous type treatment and overall layout of the book. (She used a font called “Tall Films” for the titles, and a font called “Am Sans” for the rest of the cover text.) And finally, Peggy Deemer, who shepherded the book through production and put up with about 400 paranoid emails from me about things I misspelled and section breaks I mistakenly left out of the final Word documents.

The “official” launch date for MultiReal is July 8, but if you know anything about this business you know how meaningless those official launch dates are. Amazon is claiming they already have it in stock and can deliver it to your door by Monday morning…

Look, it’s very simple: BoingBoing is (often) great, and Cory Doctorow might be a great guy, but post after post after post after post after motherfucking post of his goddamn book readings just really get fucking old after awhile. Why they can’t just put these in a special “promotion posts” folder, rather than cluttering up the main page with the same report over and over is beyond me…

[S]ome of us are bored to fucking tears having to see his diarrheic advertisements on BoingBoing all the time–like with any advertisement deluge, you risk annoying the shit out of your customer base.

That’s just one example, but a representative one.

Putting aside the merits of Cory’s new book Little Brother (which I haven’t read) and putting aside any particular complaints people have about the man’s personality (which I can’t attest to, having only met him once briefly) and putting aside his controversial views on copyright (which I often disagree with) — the whole thing seems to come down to the fact that Cory’s got a big megaphone, and he’s using it. And why shouldn’t he?

Listen, folks. That twentieth century paradigm of advertising and promotion? You know, the paradigm where the content sits on one side of the page, and the advertisements sit on the other side of the page, and there’s a nice clear line separating the two? That paradigm’s dead.

We live in an Information Age, as Boomer journalists are fond of reminding us. It’s not about selling widgets in exchange for greenbacks you can put in your pocket anymore. It’s about pushing ideas into the deep end of the swimming pool of public discourse and letting them swim. If you’ve got great ideas and you spread them around effectively, you’re gaining currency. So there’s no more hard separation; the idea and the promotion of the idea have become in many ways one and the same thing.

Sure, you’ll still find plenty of old school advertising around. You’ll find it on BoingBoing, off in the right column, separated by a nice clear line. (See pic below, slightly Photoshopped so the ads are above the fold.) You’ll find it in magazines and newspapers (but not books, though I don’t see why not). You’ll find it on television.

But sticking a glossy picture in a box separated by a nice clear line isn’t the way to move ideas. (And it wasn’t always very effective at pushing product either.) (And I suppose I’m guilty here of combining direct sales advertising and marketing, which are two very different things.) Which is why you see Doctorow’s editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden talking up Little Brother on his Making Light blog (and why you frequently see my editor, Lou Anders, talking me up on his Bowing to the Future blog). Which is why you see ARCs of Little Brother in the hands of not only reviewers and blurbers, but bloggers and tastemakers and potential customers. And which is why you frequently see Doctorow talking about issues raised in his books in his columns in Locus and the Guardian and such.

If you’re one of those people who claim to despise blatant advertising and promotion, complaining about authors like Cory Doctorow discussing their own work in a public forum is a waste of energy. Because this form of promotion is, in fact, the most honest, straightforward, and transparent form of promotion there is.

I’ve got a much smaller megaphone than Cory’s (snicker all you want, I’m talking about audience size, you losers), but I’m pretty sure the same thing is true for me as for Doctorow as for any serious author who blogs. We’re not promoting our stuff on our blogs because we’re hoping to sucker people into buying worthless product. We’re promoting it because we believe in it. Because if you’re interested in the things we say off the cuff on our blogs, you’ll definitely be interested in the carefully crafted and polished things we have to say in our books.

The blogs and the books are two sides of the same coin. So stop whining about excessive self-promotion. It’s a fact of life in the twenty-first century you’re just going to have to get used to.

Here’s the final version of the cover, front and back. There’s also a PDF of the cover available for download (623K).

As a reminder, yes, the cover painting is by the great Stephan Martiniere, who deserves all the accolades you can possibly shower upon him and more.

The copy on the back is nothing you haven’t already seen before, if you’ve visited the MultiReal website. At the top are abbreviated blurbs by Peter Watts, Nick Sagan, and Robert J. Sawyer. (They’re abbreviated because the full versions wouldn’t fit; the full versions will be right inside the front cover.) And the description of the book comes straight from the About page on the website. Cindy, you will be pleased to note that the phrase “the return of enemies old and new” has been changed to “the machinations of enemies old and new,” because as you rightly pointed out, a new enemy can’t exactly return if he wasn’t there in the first place.

The release date of the novel remains July 21, 2008. Since I’m not quite J.K. Rowling, bookstores will likely be stocking the book on the shelves a little ahead of that date.

I haven’t had time yet to read more than the first dozen pages or so, but it’s already clear to me that my novel Infoquake is a far, far better book.

How do I know that? Well, The Color of Magic only has three pages of blurbs inside the front cover — in large type, no less — while the Solaris edition of Infoquake has four and a half. The upcoming trade paperback of MultiReal ups the stakes considerably, with over nine pages of blurbs inside the cover. Nine and a half pages! By my reckoning, that makes Infoquake somewhere between 50% and 216% better than The Color of Magic.

Of course, by this standard I’m still playing catch-up to Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind. If you open up the mass market paperback for Pat’s debut, you see page after page of ecstatic blurbs and reviews from folks like Orson Scott Card and Robin Hobb, explaining why they would gladly burn the world’s last copy of Crime and Punishment if only to feed the fire that’s keeping Pat’s feet warm for twenty minutes. (I’m not saying this to be mean-spirited; it’s awe-inspiring stuff. We all love the guy who’s a scrappy loser, but less frequently admitted is how much we love the guy who’s an overbearing success. A part of me wishes that Pat was eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer this year. I would have loved to see him win by an overwhelming, blow-out margin. Remember how cool it was to watch The Return of the King take just about every Oscar in existence?)

Okay, back to the blurbs and review snippets. To quote Triumph the Comic Insult Dog: I kid! I kid!

We all know that this inside-the-cover blurb stuff is really just a marketing game that the publishers play. We all know that the presence of a ton of laudatory quotes might — might — signal the presence of a worthwhile book, but the lack of these quotes doesn’t mean the book is lacking in quality. We all know that the number of mouth-foaming quotes you find on the jacket or inside the cover serve one purpose and one purpose only: to sell you a book.

Nonetheless, it works. There are plenty of readers out there who claim that review snippets and author blurbs are totally meaningless and don’t impact their purchasing decisions. I’m not one of them. I utterly depend on compelling review snippets and/or blurbs from sources that I trust when I decide what to buy. Because to me, seeing a page of quality reviews and blurbs indicates several things:

• The blurbing authors thought highly enough of this book to have their name slathered all over it, knowing that it’s going to be used specifically for promotional purposes.
• Discerning, thoughtful critics liked the book enough that they took the time to think up a clever way to phrase their feelings about it, knowing that it’s going to be etc. etc.
• The publisher believes this book will appeal directly to readers like me by highlighting critical praise for the book and not putting one of those cheesy mini-excerpts on the first page.

(As an aside: I find those miniature excerpts on the first page of mass market paperbacks incredibly condescending. I’m sorry to report that if your book has an excerpt like that, your publisher has just dramatically decreased the probability of me buying it. Why?

1. Because you’ll usually find the most sensationalistic, cliffhangery passage of the whole book there, whether it’s germane to the plot or not.
2. Because the folks that package the book often take liberties with the author’s grammar and/or punctuation in these excerpts.
3. Because often these snippets give away crucial plot points or color my reading of the story.
4. Because they’re usually printed in a large font that screams, “Hey! I know you’re already headed to the checkout line, but I’m hoping this tiny irrelevant snippet of suggestive kinkiness, frenetic action, or lobotomized ideamongering just might be enough to inspire you to make an impulse purchase!”)

So ever since I saw the final typeset version of MultiReal with the nine and a half pages of review snippets, I’ve been ((way) over)analyzing it in my head. What does this say about my writing? What does it say about my career? Should I be proud that so many people had so many nice things to say about my first book? Does the book exhibit a Napoleon Complex by trying to show off so much? Should I mention on my blog that I wanted to include a lot of the positive comments from bloggers, as a way to show my respect and gratitude to the blogosphere for being so generous? And if I do mention that, am I being defensive?

And I’m also wondering: will these blurbs influence people’s buying decisions? Pretend you know nothing about me or my writing, and you stumble across MultiReal and its panoply of impressive-looking blurbs and review snippets in your local bookstore. How much would these pages impact your choice of whether to buy the book or not?

Here are the front and back covers. (Forgive the lousy Treo camera pics and the even lousier attempts to brighten up the lousy Treo camera pics in Photoshop.)

The mass market edition of Infoquake is being published by Solaris Books, the folks who also recently published my story “Mathralon” in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two.

And they’ve done a bang-up job of it too — this thing looks sharp. Not only is the cover art by Stephan Martiniere crisp and stunning, but Infoquake might be one of the few books that will catch just as much attention when the spine’s facing out as the cover. It’s hard to tell from the pics above, but you can read the title on the spine from across the room. Plus the book has a nice weight and thickness to it, and it tickles my vanity by opening with several pages of rave quotes from authors and reviewers. (Not as many pages of rave quotes as the mass market of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, but one can’t set the bar too high.)

Those who have read Infoquake in the (equally stunning) Pyr trade paperback version might be interested to know that I’ve made 155 changes to the text for this edition as well. But lest I be accused of breaking my own rules for ethical self-promotion, I should point out that they are entirely minor changes. For instance, one of the most substantial changes I made was to alter this somewhat nonsensical sentence…

It became less comforting still when Natch realized that several of the dartguns pointed at him were actually multi disruptors.

to this much clearer version…

It became less comforting still when Natch spotted a few multi disruptors in the group.

Much better, don’t you think? For the edification of all those future students of literature who I predict will one day be obsessively studying my works in classes taught by stuffy university professors, here is the actual Excel spreadsheet I sent to Solaris detailing my changes for the mass market edition. Really, it’s not that interesting. I’m guessing that two-thirds of the changes are me rethinking the use of italics for emphasis in character dialogue. So, “We can’t just let people die!” became “We can’t just let people die!”

(And if you future stuffy university professors are having trouble thinking up a name for the course, might I suggest “Edelquake: Decontextualizing the Metaphorical Implications of Jump 225 in a Hyperrational Postmodern Society”?)

My only regret is that it didn’t occur to me to change the Acknowledgments section in the back of the book to thank the guys at Solaris for all their hard work. So, to George Mann, Christian Dunn, and Mark Newton, I will now put on my proper British bowler hat and tip it on your direction.

The mass market of Infoquake won’t hit the stores for some weeks yet, but have I mentioned that you can pre-order a copy on Amazon? Oh yeah, I just did.

Will the novel die? I won’t keep you in suspense: Yes, the novel will die. It might not happen in your lifetime. But yes, I can say unequivocally that the novel will eventually breathe its last and lay down contentedly in the grave of dead art forms. I’ll be very conservative and estimate 50 years.

And you know what? It’s not that big a deal.

Ever since the advent of television, people have predicted the demise of the novel, and other people have smugly sat back and declared that since it hasn’t happened yet, it won’t happen at all. But I think a lot of these defenders of the novel have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a novel is, not to mention a fundamental misconception of its importance.

First off, we have to consider the question of what it means to be a dead medium. A dead medium is simply one which does not produce a significant number of new works of art. When a medium of expression dies, that doesn’t mean that the jackbooted Art Police storm into your house in the middle of the night to burn every instance of it they can find. Life ain’t Fahrenheit 451. If the last novel rolls off the printing press tomorrow at 9 a.m., we’ll still have hundreds of millions of novels lying around to enjoy until they crumble into dust. And unlike, say, the 8-track tape or the HD-DVD, there’s no specialized equipment necessary for reading novels.

Nor do the Art Police threaten anyone with imprisonment who dares to create art in a dead medium. Vinyl is a dead medium for music, and yet there are still people producing vinyl records. Polka is a dead art form, and yet you can still find people not named Weird Al Yankovic creating polka. Given the importance of the novel to Western civilization, I’m sure that printers will continue pumping the things out in special limited editions long after the masses have stopped buying them in mass quantities.

You might think that I’m mixing up the terms medium and form here. The medium of the novel is that 8″ x 12″ hunk of pulped wood, while the form of the novel is the 120,000 words of prose that gets inked onto the surface. But the point I’m trying to make here (as Frank Lloyd Wright and Marshall McLuhan made long before me) is that those two things are inextricably tied together. The medium of the novel is its form.

We haven’t always had novels. No, in fact, while recorded human history has been going on for five thousand years now (depending on how you define it), the novel has been around for less than five hundred (depending on how you define it). Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle never read a single novel in their lives; I don’t think Shakespeare could have read more than a handful of them.

The fact of the matter is that the novel itself is an art form that evolved to take advantage of a certain new technology, namely the printing press. Why do books tend to be no larger than around 8″ x 12″? Because that’s about as large as you can make a book and still be able to hold it comfortably in your hands and transport it from place to place. Why does the print tend to be around a point size of 12? Because that’s about as small as you can make text and still have it be readable at arm’s length. Take those limitations and you’ll find that you can’t easily pack more than 200,000 words into a single novel.

So the novel is, in fact, a device that’s both created by and limited by certain factors of human physiology. These same limitations govern any art form. Ever wonder why most films are less than 180 minutes in length? There are certain issues surrounding the economics of movie theater chains and the technical specs of film projectors, but the real reason is even simpler. 180 minutes is about the amount of time that human beings can comfortably sit and pay attention to a film without having to either eat or hit the bathroom. Tack in an intermission or two and you can extend that timeframe for a while. But until we’ve got gastrointestinal and neurological programming that allows us to drastically extend the amount of time between bathroom breaks and naps, you’re never going to see, say, a 26-hour movie.

If you don’t believe that the printing process hinders creativity, consider this: most novelists don’t even write in print anymore. The vast majority of us compose our words electronically on computer screens. What you’re reading when you pick up a novel is a transposition of our art; you’re reading some publisher’s translation of our words onto an 8″ x 12″ hunk of pulped wood with a glossy piece of laminated artwork wrapped around it. Not only do novelists have little to do with the production of that hunk of pulped wood, but we’re often actively discouraged and prevented from having a say in it. We hand in Microsoft Word files. We don’t pick the cover artists, we don’t do the typesetting, we don’t design the little artsy doodads that drape over the chapter numbers.

The point I’m making is that there’s nothing magical about the size, shape, and length of a novel. There’s no divine law which states that the perfect size of a story is between 80,000 and 150,000 words. That just happens to be the number of words that will comfortably fit in your hands using standard twentieth century printing technology. It happens to be what the twentieth century publishing, distribution, and retail business was set up to deal with.

But now? With electronic media, you can fit an infinite number of words in your hands. You can hold Robert Jordan’s entire Wheel of Time series in your sweaty mitts if it’s digitized on a laptop or an Amazon Kindle.

It’s true that reading in digitized format is still kind of an unwieldy affair. You don’t find people reading novels on the subway with their laptops because it’s a pain. You have to boot the things up, you have to plug them in every few hours, and God help you if you spill a can of Dr. Pepper on them. I have yet to see an Amazon Kindle in the flesh (so to speak), but my impression is that Jeff Bezos hasn’t quite cracked the code on this one either. And, honestly, I don’t think he — or anyone else — will crack the code. Sorry, folks: I’ve been saying for years that there just isn’t enough money in novel publishing to support a dedicated e-book reader. The economics just isn’t there. (I won’t waste time going into the reasons for this, since Charlie Stross has done a fine job of it already.)

No, the novel will move onto the laptop computer — or whatever the laptop computer becomes in the next 20 to 30 years. Think about it: the MacBook Air fits in a manila folder. The MacBook 2020 will fit in a manila folder, and might just be foldable and solar powered too. Laptop screen text has finally gotten to the point where it’s easily readable just in the past few years, with the advent of LCD screens and font smoothing technologies like ClearType. In another fifteen years, onscreen text will be more readable than print text — plus you’ll be able to read it in any kind of lighting, resize it at will, and project it onto large surfaces.

Very soon we’re going to have a medium for distributing the written word that’s not only easier but better suited to the task than books. So let’s dispense with the silly, sentimental arguments you often hear about why storytelling is never going to go electronic. “You can’t replace the feeling of a holding a book,” “I don’t like reading on a screen,” and “I can’t read an e-book in the bathtub” are some of the sillier excuses you hear all the time for why printed books are going to survive until the end of time. I’m sorry, but “I can hold my entire library in my hand,” “I can download new books at will,” “I can search my entire library in a nanosecond,” “I can instantly send books to my friends,” “I can translate and define words on the fly,” and “I don’t have to devote an entire room of my house to holding my books” are going to trump reading in the bathtub any day of the week.

(Besides which… do you really think your laptop computer is going to be subject to being shorted out by a splash of water for very long? Dude, I’m willing to bet that your grandkids — if not your kids — if not you — will have no problem accessing their computers underwater.)

To sum up: the written word is going electronic. Permanently. Soon. Once that happens, storytellers will have no need to shoehorn their stories into these 8″ x 12″ hunks of pulped wood and ink. And once we’re not restricted to the medium of the novel, we’ll be leaving the form behind.

The death of the novel doesn’t mean the death of storytelling. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever going to put an Aristotelian structure of fiction into 120,000 words. On the contrary, it’s going to mean that storytelling will finally be unleashed. We’re going to see fiction strap on blue tights and a red cape and really soar.

Personally I think that’s going to be fun to see.

* * *

An interesting side point: You don’t see many people whining over the (imminent) death of the CD. At least not in artistic terms. There are plenty of people bemoaning the economics of the music biz, but I haven’t heard anyone claim that the art itself is suffering for it. Why? Because music continues on. We recognize that what we enjoy about the music is the actual notes; all the other stuff (the liner notes, the cover art, the videos, the arrangement of songs in 10- to 12-song chunks) is extraneous.

I wonder how long musical artists will continue to produce 3- to 5-minute songs. The length of the typical rock song is no accident; it happens to correspond rather nicely with the amount of music a 45 RPM record will hold. When the 33 1/3 RPM record became the dominant force in popular music in the 1960s and artists were suddenly freed from the constraints of the 45 RPM record, you saw the birth of the so-called “concept album.” I suspect popular music is still around 3 to 5 minutes in length for two reasons: because broadband technologies still make it prohibitive to download anything much longer than that for a large number of consumers; and because musicians are still under the influence of commercial television and feature films. A five-minute song is the perfect length to play behind movie credits or in between commercial breaks.

So what would the “normal” length of a piece of music be, freed from any technological constraints? Keep in mind that we still have physiological restraints of memory and basic human restlessness to consider. I suspect, based on little more than gut instinct, that 12 to 15 minutes might be a more natural length of time for a piece of music.

Which leads to the question of how long the “normal” story will be, freed from any technological constraints. Hard to say, and I’m not really even willing to hazard a guess.

Quick excerpt from my response:

From a publishing perspective, series are absolutely not a barrier to gaining new readership. And there’s a simple reason why: more books on the shelves equals more bookstore real estate devoted to the author, which equals more of a chance that the author’s books will attract the attention of a potential reader. Once you’ve caught a reader’s interest, it’s easy enough for them to find the earlier books online, or (gasp!) special order them from the information counter.

You can also find responses from my editor Lou Anders, my pal Chris Roberson, my buddy John Joseph Adams, and a blogger named Joe Sherry who I don’t know from (John Joseph) Adam(s) but seems like a nice fellow. In fact, he linked to my website from his blog Adventures in Reading, so he must be a nice fellow. (And I’m happy to return the favor.)

People who aren’t in the writing and publishing business often have skewed ideas of how the business works. I’ve had to educate more than one eager friend or family member who thought the best way to promote Infoquake was to walk into Barnes & Noble and turn the book facing out on the shelf so it covers up David Eddings’ titles next door. I tell them to please stop doing this, because David Eddings sends armed hooligans to ding up my car with cricket bats every time he finds one of my books in front of his.

So now let me educate you, o blog reader, on some ways you can help pimp your favorite author, and some ways you should not pimp your favorite author.

Do…

…buy the author’s books. That’s the first and most obvious thing you can do. There’s really no need to analyze strategically which venue you should buy an author’s books from. We’re generally not so particular where you pick them up or for what price. Just buy ‘em, and read ‘em.

…buy the author’s books at their preferred venue, if you have the choice. The foregoing notwithstanding, many authors would be happy to see you buy their books from a specific venue, if it’s all the same to you. What is the author’s preferred venue? It varies. Check the author’s website (assuming they have one) to see if they have something other than the standard Amazon button listed. Lots of authors like to champion independent stores like Clarkesworld, Mysterious Galaxy, and Powell’s. Rob Sawyer politely pushes you to buy autographed copies on his eBay store.

…tell your circle of friends and acquaintances about the author’s work. Duh. Word of mouth is the absolute number one way that most books are sold these days. So aside from buying the book, the most important thing you can do to promote your favorite author is to put your mouth to work for them. Don’t feel like you need to compose a detailed essay or review; don’t be pushy or intimidating. Just spread the word, one person at a time. I’ve had people tell me how they sent emails to a groups of their friends, and then some of those people go off and email a group of their friends. It snowballs.

…use social networking tools like Digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace, and LibraryThing. See all those little funky icons at the bottom of blog posts all over the web? They lead to social networking sites that can seriously boost an author’s web traffic (and consequently, their visibility and sales). I got a surprise jump in traffic from someone who listed my post on The Return of the King on StumbleUpon. (Here’s the StumbleUpon page.) How big a jump? About 14,000 visitors in the space of a few days. That’s 14,000 potential new readers who might not have heard of me before.

…write a positive Amazon review. Don’t worry too much about the other specialty book sites out there; people may buy books from a number of different online venues, but they go to the Amazon reviews to hear the buzz. Keep in mind that generic two-line five-star reviews with no content (“David Lewis Edleman Rulez!!!!!!!”) and reviews that are obviously from friends and family (“Even if David Louis Edelman hadn’t donated a kidney to my sick child, I still would recommend his books!”) don’t help. Thoughtful critiques that don’t just summarize plot or shovel out meaningless platitudes — even critiques that contain negative impressions — are much more persuasive.

…write about the author on your own site(s) and link to the author’s website. Got a blog or a website? It may seem like a no-brainer to write reviews of your author’s favorite works. But linking to the author’s website helps in a number of other, less visible ways: with Technorati ratings, with Google rankings, with Alexa rankings, etc. Not to mention having your favorite author’s name linked on your site is a constant tickler to your web visitors, who may be inclined to purchase something on your recommendation, but who might not always remember the name of the author you recommended.

…join the author’s mailing list. Yes, lots of people get their information from RSS feeds and Tumblelogs and Facebook updates and the like. But believe it or not, email is still far and away the number one driver of Internet traffic. Some authors just send out ticklers with release dates and upcoming events; others really put their heart into it. But mailing lists give authors a simple way to get in touch with their readers all in one pop. Fellow Pyr author Kay Kenyon has a dynamite newsletter wherein she dispenses writing tips and little mini-essays about her fiction, if you’re looking for a good example. (Here’s the signup for my mailing list, if you’re interested. Just sayin’.)

…ask for the author’s work at your local bookstore. Yes, it’s a computerized world, and book chains largely stock books on their shelves based on impersonal corporate formulae developed by Darth Vader in consultation with Russian mobsters, big tobacco companies, and Dick Cheney. But that doesn’t mean that bookstore managers don’t listen to what their customers are saying. Books like The Red Tent and The Tipping Point became hits largely because of a groundswell of demand from readers. It can happen.

…suggest the author’s work at your book club or reading circle. Depending on the size of your book club, that’s a large number of potential sales all at once, and a large number of people to potentially spread the word. Plus it’s a nice little ego boost for an author to hear that a group of people specifically got together to discuss their work.

…send the author a note of encouragement. I suppose Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin aren’t hurting for the lack of encouraging fan mail. But keep in mind that writing is a solitary occupation; we writers don’t get the instant validation of applause when you enjoy our books. So most of us get very encouraged by fan emails, because it’s the only way we know that you’re digging what we’re doing. I’m not saying you need to write a 12-paragraph discourse on how their works have changed your life; but just letting an author know that you loved their book, will be buying more, and will be spreading the word among your friends does help. Really.

Don’t…

…feel guilty about checking the author’s work out of the library. Some fans are under the mistaken impression that checking an author’s work out of the library instead of buying it is a betrayal of sorts. It’s not. After all, libraries are paying customers too, aren’t they? Libraries keep track of which books are checked out and which molder on the shelves, and that affects their purchases of future books.

…move the author’s books around on the bookstore shelves. Ever been tempted to grab a stack of your author’s latest and sneak it over to the new releases table? Resist that temptation, pal. Believe it or not, the spots on those new release tables and window displays are often paid for by publishers. Messing around with Barnes & Noble displays might sell a few extra copies for your favorite author, but it’s equally likely to piss off the bookstore management.

…pester people to buy the author’s work. It’s one thing to recommend your favorite author to your friends; it’s another thing to irritate the hell out of them by pushing them to read the author’s books when they’re clearly not interested. I purposefully avoided watching Firefly until long after the show was dead and buried, because I kept hearing how much I should be watching it. You certainly don’t want to push people away from your favorite authors like that.

…worry if you didn’t buy the book through the author’s Amazon link. You’re probably aware that authors get extra commission from Amazon if you buy their book through the specially crafted link on their site. And considering that authors only get a relatively small percentage of every sale after the money is sliced up among publishers and agents, that commission can double an author’s profit. But guess what? It’s one sale, and the dirty little secret of the publishing industry is that Amazon sales are generally not a very big percentage of an author’s total. So click the link if you remember, but don’t sweat it if you forget it.

…special order copies of the author’s books and then not purchase them. Guess what? Those five copies you special ordered from Borders and never picked up? The manager didn’t shrug her shoulders after you failed to purchase the books and then shelve them in a special display at the front of the store. She sent them straight back to the publisher, and the publisher docked those sales off the author’s royalty statement.

…try to sabotage other authors. This isn’t a winner-take-all game. You can promote the good things about your author without writing nasty anonymous Amazon reviews about the other guy.

* * *

Okay… so, what am I missing?

* * *

(Apologies to the 2005 picketers of the Kenosha, Wisconsin school board, who have fallen victim to my mad Photoshop skillz above. No apologies to the raging douchebags in the second photo, who get their kicks out of telling gay people that they’re going to Hell. Be thankful I didn’t Photoshop something much nastier in there.)

But even more important, the Internet has allowed me to keep in touch with readers during the (too long) break between novels. Before the prevalence of websites and blogs, the only way for newer SF authors to keep their name in the public eye was to write gobs of short stories and spend a lot of time on the con circuit. Now I can have an ongoing one-on-one dialog with readers through the blogosphere and social networking sites, and keep them posted on news of my next book.

In addition to my response, you can also read responses to the same question from fellow authors Matthew Jarpe and Tobias Buckell, my editor Lou Anders, and book marketing expert Andrew Wheeler.

The chapter in question is a flashback featuring a conversation between Marcus Surina and his daughter Margaret. In the original passage, Marcus says: “There’s a look people get when the Null Current is about to pull them under, Margaret. A look of inevitability. It’s the look of the stalk of wheat, watching the thresher approach and knowing that the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun.”

Now Marcus Surina’s supposed to be a little — well, odd. But Deanna’s concern was that having him ascribe emotion to a stalk of wheat might be a little too odd. So we hashed it out this morning over IM as follows:

Deanna: With the wheat thing, maybe about a mouse that can’t get away fast enough?

Deanna: I’ll look at it more closely on second read, or you can let me know if you think of something.

DLE: Let me look at that sentence

Deanna: I just know it hit me as off when I read it the first time.

DLE: Hmm

DLE: You’re right… it does seem weird for a stalk of wheat to have a “look”

Deanna: Yeah, I was afraid the reader would perceive him as loonier than you intended.

DLE: He *is* supposed to be odd, and use really weird metaphors

DLE: But… you’re right. That might be pushing it.

DLE: What if I said something like “It’s the look that the stalk of wheat must get when it watches the thresher approach…”

DLE: Does the “must get” distance it at all?

Deanna: Hm. I think “look” is really the problem.

Deanna: “Look” with “wheat”

Deanna: From my way of thinking…

Deanna: It’s early in the book. The reader isn’t going to know yet if it’s just him who talks that way, or if you just write that way. I would fear someone picking it up in the bookstore and thumbing through the first few pages might think you continually use those.

Deanna: It’s made more clear when you get to the part that explains his daughter thinks it’s weird.

Deanna: But your call regardless.

DLE: No, I totally understand what you mean

DLE: I just really want to keep the wheat metaphor in there somehow

Deanna: Not a mouse among the wheat?

Deanna: Hm…

Deanna: Well, I think you’d want to avoid ascribing emotion to the wheat.

DLE: Well, the point is that it’s seasonal… the wheat gets old and dies, a new crop rises up, then it grows old, etc.

DLE: LOL Sure, no, you’re right

Deanna: Oh, I wasn’t getting that. I thought it was just about the thresher coming.

DLE: Well, there’s that aspect too

Deanna: (Trying to think of live things that come and go in seasons, like mayflies…)

DLE: Hmm…

DLE: I’m wondering if I can reconstruct that paragraph so that he can use the metaphor without using a “look” of the wheat

Deanna: I’m sure you can.

DLE: I wonder if I did something like “It’s like the stalk of wheat, when the thresher approaches and the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun.”

Deanna: That would probably work.

DLE: Let me think on it a few minutes here…

Deanna: NP. I’m just continuing to CE.

DLE: Okay. How’s this: “Like the stalk of wheat when the thresher approaches, and the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun.”

Deanna: Let me go back and look at context.

Deanna: Well, it’s better. But the context is still talking about a look.

DLE: Hmm.

Deanna: It doesn’t have to be decided right now at all.

Deanna: You can think about it.

DLE: When I say “look,” I’m thinking more about the aspect of something when *you* look at it…

DLE: What if I said “You can look at some people and tell when the Null Current is about to pull them under. It’s inevitable. Just like you can look at the stalk of wheat,” etc.

DLE: Something like that

Deanna: That would be better. It ascribes agency to a human then.

DLE: Yeah.

DLE: “Some people, you can look in their eyes and see that the Null Current is about to pull them under, Margaret. You can see the inevitability. Just like you can see the stalk of wheat as the thresher approaches, and know that the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun.”

Deanna: Yeah.

DLE: Cool. You’re right, I like that better.

DLE: As soon as you mentioned this, I started thinking of a stalk of wheat with a little cartoon face on it going “Oooooh noooo!!!”

DLE: And that’s not good.

Deanna: LOLZ

So that’s how it went.

Don’t think that we’re going to have conversations like that about something on every page in the book. But we’ll probably have half a dozen or more of these kinds of conversations throughout the copyediting process.

My understanding of the business is that this kind of interaction between copy editor and author is an anomaly, and that most of the time the twain shall ne’er meet. But personally I can’t see the harm in it. It helps produce a better book, doesn’t it?