Word of mouth is the single most powerful selling tool known to man. Studies have shown people trust a personal recommendation over institutional reviews, celebrity testimonials, advertisements, or a guy wearing sandwich boards hanging around the CVS. Now, of course we have e-word of mouth through Face and Twit. Is it the same as your friend raving about The Goon Squad or Jeff Eugenides new novel, or Daniel Craig in chaps in Cowboys and Aliens? How did book groups proliferate? One minute everyone is reading alone in a chair, the next they’re sitting around with a bunch of women drinking Chardonnay in Polartec vests reading Cutting for Stone. How? Word of mouth. Operator. Pollination. Water Cooler. What’s on your Ipod? What are you reading? What have you read? What do you recommend? This is not my beautiful wife.
What was the last book you recommended or bought from a recommendation. Word. Of. Mouth.
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I was in a mall today with a Borders. Liquidations signs everywhere. 30% off of everything. The shelves were picked over with the exception of twenty or so copies of the Bush autobiography and a ton of Hello Kitty shit. It was all so depressing, and I was never a big fan of Borders. The thing is it looked like more than the death of a store or the second largest bookstore chain. It looked like the end of our industry as we know it. I hated everyone in there pawing over books and bargain shopping. I heard one young guy, hoisting a Tom Clancy, complain about the cost, even with the discount. “This is what is wrong with books,” he said, “I don’t have thirty bucks.” I’ve tried in these posts never to go negative unless it was about myself. I’m not a sky is falling type, and I truly believe that books are superior to any electronic readers, and when the dust settles books will still be there. But right now, it’s difficult, it not near impossible, to feel that books are anything but an endangered species.
Take your time. Take your time is code for: read my pages now. When a writer says read it whenever you get a chance, he means skip your daughter’s wedding and get reading, pal. There is nothing more adorable than a writer pretending to be mellow, cool, chill. Dude, read it whenevs. I’m already working on a new project. I could use a big break so take your time. Take your time is code for: my life is in the balance. Writers have developed all sorts of coping mechanisms to cope with the waiting. Some include: self-flagellation, excessive self-love, massive weight gain, massive weight loss, cleaning and organizing, chopping garlic, and my personal favorite: cutting frayed towels into dust rags.
How many times have I heard a writer say, upon delivering his book, “Be brutally honest.” Really? Wouldn’t honest suffice? I don’t think anyone really wants brutal honesty, especially once they get it. Some editors can take out your molars and you don’t feel any pain, their “brutal” notes couched in kind and supportive suggestions. Other editors can take a single hair from your head and make you feel as if you’ve been scalped, so sharp their hatchets. Do we say be brutally honest because we suspect our reader will otherwise be too gentle or generous with us?
This is a big one. A big lie. And whenever a writer tells me this, I think long and hard before taking him on. Can you guess what it is? Okay, stand back, here it is: I don’t need a lot of handholding. LIE. LIE. LIE. Sans truth. That’s like a guy saying he doesn’t like blow jobs. Or a gal saying she doesn’t like Bosch appliances. Look, anyone who thinks they don’t need handholding through the fun-loving process of getting published is kidding himself. But it’s worse than that because invariably the person who makes this pronouncement is the one who needs far more than hand holding. He needs pep talks, commiseration conversations, babysitting, spoon feeding and diaper changing.
Sometimes, there comes a moment in the writing of a book when a writer tells me, in hushed tones, that he needs a studio, an office, a yurt, just some other place to go and write. He is emphatic. He can no longer get his work done — only a move can save him. Often writers work from home and suffer a certain lack of solitude, privacy, quiet. They need a place to sprawl out, to leave their papers and books about. They need a place to think. I get all that. Writers need to get away from the kids, the phone, the UPS man. Still, there’s Mary Higgins Clark who dragged her typewriter on to the fire escape every night after she got the dishes washed and put her kids to bed. Or Ray Bradbury who deposited dimes into the typewriters at the public library to bang out his fiction. And many like them. When you have to write, when you are at the beginning of your career, you’d write on the roof of your mouth if you had to. Is it just me or does a room of one’s own sound more like a place to jack off and smoke dope? Yes, of course you need a corner of your own, but not mid-book. When you want to find a new place mid-project you’re looking for a geographical cure, and like most geographical cures they usually turn out to be short-lived and expensive. The minute you think something like a new space can save you, you’re a goner.
Whenever a writer tells me that he has had a realization, a break-through, an epiphany, I always have the same reaction: dread. Call me cynical, but I’d much prefer a writer tell me that he has taken a few baby steps, has slightly moved the needle, or figured out some small piece of the puzzle. Am I being too Jewish? Can you achieve greatness if you don’t behold the world and exalt its grandeur? What am I even saying? Is it possible to figure out your work if you can’t figure out your life? Or is your art a key to your life, or to life? And does it stick? Stay? Can you hold on to a catharsis? What would it look like? For me, a structure as beautiful as DNA, or an Escher print, or field of corn in late August sun.
I take a pill for my moods. I take a pill to boost the pill I take for my moods. I take a pill for my thyroid, and a pill to help the thyroid pill. I take a pill to sleep and a pill to wake. I take a pill for dreams and a pill for nightmares. I take a pill to crap, and a pill not to crap. I take an iron pill. And magnesium. I take a pill to help me write. A pill to help me read. I take a pill for memory and a pill for forgetting. I take a pill for nosebleeds and sexual tension. A pill to help me drive at night, to reduce the effect of bad manners, and to get the waiter’s attention. I take a pill to pitch books, handle rejection, conduct auctions, and parlay offers. Infrequently, I have to take a pill to let an author down when his book doesn’t sell. That is a bitter pill.
Betsy Lerner 