On Writing – Pay For Play: Selling Out

One of the benefits of being a writer is setting your own schedule. That means that if you want to watch Rachel Ray make white bean chili in the middle of the afternoon you may. By chance, I did just that the other day.  In the midst of the chili instruction, Rachel specified a certain brand of white beans. She showed the can to the camera.  I said to myself, “okay.” Maybe that’s her favorite. Or maybe that’s what they had on hand. As the demonstration continued there were several beauty shots of cans of beans arranged artfully with the same brand name clearly readable, clearly an ad.  Now it irritated me.  I was still going to get all the regular commercials— far too many if you ask me, plus those in the body of the show in quite possibly the most blatant manner possible. This was product placement beyond product placement. They were trying to get one over on me and it was clumsily done.  Movies have been doing this for years, usually with a higher degree of subtlety. The most egregious was in a recent Bond film where the studio replaced Bond’s Aston Martin with a BMW.  All this made me curious about books. The blog, Crimezine, posted an interesting James Bond book spoof of product placement at its most ridiculous — and humorous. But are there writers who accept additional fees for mentioning a product by name?

As a general rule, I’d advise writers against the practice. But I do mention brand names in my books.  Often.  Let me explain. First I’ve never accepted any money to mention a product.  Second, nobody’s offered.  However, as a means to make the scene real and to describe a character, I have no problem letting an established brand name help me define someone.  If I say ‘”she wore a yellow scarf,’ I have not conveyed the same sense as “she wore an Hermes scarf.”  I might say, “He drove a luxury car.” That may be enough; but what if if he drove a Mercedes sedan, a Ferrari or, a Tesla? They are all luxury cars, but each choice defines the driver specifically and differently.  Isn’t that what a writer is supposed to do? In the good old, days, a tough private eye wouldn’t smoke a dainty Parliament with a recessed filter or a Newport.  He would smoke a Camel or a Lucky Strike. Clearly identifying a weapon may be important in a murder mystery. The point is: brand names might help us tell a better story or, if not wisely used, spoil it.

I would also say that to the extent our fiction is also recorded history, the added detail gives the story lasting value. On the other hand, if you are trying to make your story timeless, using brand names may be counter productive.

Unfortunately if you let a product placement have a say in the TV show, movie or book, you are letting the tail wag the dog.  This is never a good idea.

I hope readers will let me know how they feel about product placement.  I am most curious if any writers engage in the practice and how they feel about it.

Commentary — Fiction, Art, Music: Perchance To Dream Or Live In Another World

I’ve wandered into this territory before.  I understand dreams that feature family and friends and other people who are major players in our lives.  I am amazed, however, at the mechanism that puts them together in some sort of narrative. I often enjoy the experience even when the stories are surreal and often try to make sense of what the subconscious stitched together. Is there a way to interpret dreams to provide meaning or gain insight into our lives? Unfortunately, the ephemeral little stories easily slip from my grasp.

I also love those moments when I spend time with my dog Casey, though he’s been gone now quite a few years.  It’s always a pleasant visit. My old Karmann Ghia returns regularly. And sometimes the theater is mind blowing in an — excuse me – awesome way. Blockbuster dreams, with special effects that seem to defy the laws of physics.

On the other hand I am completely mystified by the appearance of people in these nighttime dramas whom I’ve never met, yet they have full-blown personalities and we somehow interact in places I’ve never been.

We are likely unaware of the many messages our brains receive while we are doing something else.  I suspect we take in scents, fleeting peripheral images, the brief breeze on our skin and bites of sound that go directly to the subconscious. These too must be processed and quite likely they are stored in some fashion.  Maybe they too are retrieved and thrown into the mix when the Brain Studio composes and releases its nightly productions.

As a fiction writer I’ve consciously made up people and places and events. While I may have, from time to time, borrowed traits from existing humans and certainly real-life settings, I seem to make others up out of whole cloth or at least I thought I did.  Flattering myself now, I’ve done so at least somewhat convincingly at times.  So, why is it a stretch to accept these appearances of previously unknown characters in my dreams? Perhaps they come from the collection of those inadvertent, consciously unrecorded sensations.

I suppose because my mind is writing books somewhat consciously, the ego says, “I did it.” But, while we dream, the brain creates the characters, fixes the time, determines the setting and puts the events in motion without my conscious intervention. In a sense, “I didn’t do it. My brain did it.”

If it can do that, what else can it do on its own or without my so-called conscious direction? This says we are not solely our conscious selves, the self we know.  We are also someone whom, to a greater or lesser extent, we don’t know.

Obviously, this other mind, sub mind, alter ego – call it what you will – is capable of making choices, perhaps piecing together snippets of sensations we weren’t aware we were experiencing and, in turn, creating a world that not only seems foreign to us, but is.  Is it possible, then, for that other (alter, sub) to take over?

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, also known as multiple personality) is not new and it is controversial. Many respected researchers and academics discredit DID as a legitimate mental illness. For those who do accept it, the diagnosis is often reserved for those who have experienced childhood abuse or who have been victims of other extreme circumstances in which disassociation is an act of self-preservation.  My little commentary isn’t meant to jump into this particular fray, though fiction (mystery, thriller, horror) writers have found fertile ground here.

Instead, my comments are meant to help me flesh out a fictional character in a book I’m working on. This has been an exercise in purposefully tapping my subconscious and trying to figure out why he may have the doubts he has about about who or what is controlling his actions. Writers might ask this question about his or her work. 

Opinion — A Mini-Rant On The Publishing Wars

Scribner's Bookstore, Books as Treasures (Princeton)

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman and the prestigious Author’s Guild as well as many best-selling authors have pretty much painted Amazon as super villain and enemy of freedom and democracy.  Krugman made the point in a recent column that Amazon is not playing fair with Hatchette, the last of the big American publishers and that this endangers the American way of life. I’m a fan of Krugman, the Guild and many of the anti-Amazon authors, most of whom are gigantic businesses themselves.  I have no doubt Amazon is playing hardball and, as is the case in all major battles, folks get hurt. It wasn’t long ago that Borders and Barnes and Noble decimated independent bookstores through predatory location practices getting better deals from big publisher and therefore offering discounts not possible for the independents to offer. The marketplace changes, technology evolves, reader habits respond to the environment. 

But let’s look at some facts and put them in perspective. Hachette isn’t an American publisher.  It is French. That is certainly no crime and its country of origin wouldn’t put me off one iota, but this publisher, like the others in the Top Five, is also gobbling or trying to gobble up smaller publishers who, as a matter of practice, are more open to publishing non-best-selling writers and giving new writers a chance. The Big Five publishers are global and we need not think of them as vulnerable little Davids facing the Amazon Goliath. The truth is, at least for the moment, Amazon provides affordable services for authors and small publishers who seek entry into the marketplace. These aren’t saints and sinners we’re talking about but market forces waging battle. Both sides are causing collateral damage.

The other song being sung to shame Amazon is that the master on-line retailer considers books to be “products.”   I deeply empathize.  Books are special in my eyes. They are not widgets. However different folks look at what we do in different ways.  Not only do we create “products,” we create “content” in some minds, however abhorrent those words are to us.

Do the publishers hold the book to be as sacred as writers do?  Do they hold it in higher regard than Amazon?  I remember reading that publishers like Random House and Scribners used to keep money aside for talented writers to keep them afloat when the writer’s books didn’t sell. The company took a loss for the sake of art and because they considered books more than widgets.  I was lucky enough to visit the great Scribner & Sons Book Store on Fifth Avenue in New York before its various metamorphoses. These were hallowed grounds, books as a religion. There was no doubt the publisher held books in high regard. So when I hear authors use the product argument, but only against Amazon, I’m more than wary especially in the age of author James Patterson’s factory-produced novels and Stephen King, who has a new book out every five minutes. Bless him. He is tremendously successful because he is tremendously talented; but his one-sided criticism of Amazon, if not self-serving, rings false to me.

Indianapolis Central Library, A Place Where Books Are Not Products (Tierney)

And independent booksellers: No doubt Amazon is making life difficult, but have you forgotten how the big publishers treated you when the big box bookstores roamed the earth?

I’m not about to suggest the Vatican start the saint-making process for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. If nothing else, he’s been called on to address a few unpleasant workplace issues.  I am saying that we are seeing the dirty business of big business messing around in the book business.  With only five publishers dominating the world market, should we be surprised?  Seems to me the only entity holding a genuine reverence for books are public libraries, which have been singled out for severe budget cuts all across the country.

On Writing — How Many Words Are Too Many? How Many Words Are Too Few?

Thomas Mann's Classic, 80 Pages

From a business marketing point of view I understand that because of production costs, brand image and customer demand most publishing companies have developed criteria for the books they publish.  Maybe they only publish mysteries. Why not?  Maybe they specialize even further and publish only noir or maybe only cozies. Makes sense to me.  Do what you know best.  Or do what you love. Most publishers have another requirement ­— word count.  Though this is most annoying to me, having a minimum word requirement isn’t arbitrary on their part.  Experience has taught them that buyers of mystery novels, at the moment, expect 60,000 to 80,000 words. According comments I’ve picked up as I sample various blogs on writing and reading, many, many readers feel cheated if there isn’t certain heft to the work.  They don’t count words, or really look at type size or leading, or the white space between chapters but they do look at the number of pages. I think they need to know how misleading that can be.  Sure, if you are a reader who likes epic novels or story that covers a group of characters over generations, a big, thick, doorstop of a book may be essential to tell the story. But generally speaking, I think readers ought to know that the satisfaction a reader receives isn’t quantitative, it’s qualitative.

I remember reading a mystery a few years ago by a best-selling, award-winning author when I came upon a passage that described a place that was very familiar to me. That description, though paraphrased, was awfully close to the description on the entity’s web site. In reality, no harm, no foul. In fact, the organization’s PR Department was probably grateful for the exposure.  On the other hand the lengthy passage did nothing to advance the plot, develop character or add color to the setting.  I’d bet my bottom dollar, as they used to say, that this bit of diverting narrative was added later to meet the publisher’s word count requirement. I can imagine the writer’s frustration.  The book was done, but damn, it was 8,000 words short.

Tolstoy's Tome, 1,296 pages

In an ideal world, we writers would prefer to tell the story with the number of words it takes to tell the story, whether that turns out to be 20,000 or 120,000. (If you are a writer who disagrees with that, I’d love to hear from you.)

Perhaps, in the future, technology (both print and electronic) will convince publishers to stop adding filler to their products. I believe asking a writer to make the work longer simply to make it longer is like telling Van Gogh to make that picture of the sunflowers a couple of inches taller.  

Meanwhile, I have really good mystery manuscript called Wake Up Little Theo that comes in 3,000 words short of the 60,000 mark just sitting round gathering dust.

On Writing & Publishing — On Paper And On Screen, Who Has The Content And Who Can Deliver It?

Jeff Bezos

I’m not the first person to say it and, in fact, many who said it earlier have moved on. But in the book, film and news/information business, it will all boil down to content and delivery. This is why the purchase of The Washington Post is so stunning. Whatever Jeff Bezos’ original intent, we may never know. Maybe he just likes a challenge, doing what some deem as impossible.  It would be a hell of an accomplishment. Of course, owning a newspaper like the Post gives him prestige and significant influence in D.C.— though there is no indication that he is driven politically. Given his unconventional, often criticized creation of Amazon, my bet is that what will come out of this is another major transformation in the digital sweep of business and culture. 

It should be noted that the Post purchase wasn’t made by Amazon, but by Bezos personally — change from the penny jar on his chest of drawers.

For now, the publishing world is in a tizzy.  This is another tizzy.  If the big book publishers and big box booksellers got caught with their technological pants down, so too the newspaper owners.  Bezos, giant slayer, has to be scaring those pants all the way off people who deliver the news the same way they did in 1940 — on huge sheets of paper that have to be printed, cut, folded, stacked and physically delivered.  The newspapers eventually responded, by putting their papers online.  It was a defensive, reluctant and largely thoughtless conversion. Not one of them have been able to successfully monetize their hastily-crafted web sites to the extent needed for them to pay for the actual getting of the news.  Conventional wisdom confirmed the original diagnosis: Death.

Warren Buffett

But for all the fretting about the painfully slow and keenly observable death of newspapers, something doesn’t make sense.  Money-making Guru Warren Buffett is now gobbling up daily newspapers around the U.S. at a time when most financial experts think the newspaper business has as much future as pay telephones and VHS. None of Buffett’s 30 smaller metro dailies and 40 weekly papers have the stature or circulation of The Washington Post, but at the rate Buffet is going he’ll have those little tacks covering the entire U.S. map. There are some major papers for sale. Rumors suggest the Koch Brothers are flirting with a major newspaper purchase that could include the Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the Orlando Sentinel.  Some are claiming that billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg hates The New York Times so much he might buy it. “Not for sale,” say the Times owners.

In the ‘70s, rich folk sought respect by buying a Picasso. Now they buy dying newspapers?   Still with all these major players, something is going on. My take is that Amazon’s Bezos is the one to watch.

Half of the Koch Brothers

None of the others have the experience in content and delivery.  Amazon, don’t forget, is well more than a bookseller. It is a book publisher, a film and video distributor operating in a sophisticated but easily accessible environment. Amazon has also become a broad-based on-line retailer. How difficult could it be for the Washington Post, a highly respected newspaper firmly entrenched in our nation’s capitol, coupled with a company already connected to perhaps one of the largest paying data bases ever to set up the Post as our first true nation’s newspaper?

Our national newspaper (sorry U.S.A Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) is ready each morning on our TV set or pad or phone where we have the option of reading the news in story form or watching it in video form or any way we want.  You choose.  Mix ‘em up if you want as you sip your coffee made with beans that arrived yesterday from Amazon.  Slip on the shoes FED Ex delivered last Friday and go to work.  Dinner will arrive late afternoon. When you get home, check out the Post for any updates, order that new Stephen King Book as well as a download of The Godfather for tonight.  When you’re ready, heat up Amazon’s Bistro dinner in the microwave and uncork a bottle of Bezos Bordeaux.

Amazon can deliver — anything.  The content not only exists, but if you’re worried, Amazon will see that is written, that it will be filmed or constructed or grown. And it will be delivered.  All systems are in place.

Disclosure:  Over the years my books, like hundreds of thousands of others, have been available on Amazon in a variety of formats. All of he above is pure opinion.