The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:20:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 What Can China Teach London About a "Harmonious Society"? http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/what-can-china-teach-london-about-a-harmonious-society http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/what-can-china-teach-london-about-a-harmonious-society#comments Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:20:33 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/what-can-china-teach-london-about-a-harmonious-society Tonight, at PowerHouse Arena, it is the Brooklyn Launch Party for Tom Scocca's Beijing Welcomes You, a nonfiction chronicle of what Beijing has so recently become. As China is now (well, as usual) so much in the news, we asked him some questions!

Choire Sicha: Tom Scocca, as you have written a book called Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future, which is brand new and good and also a book I have read, you are the only expert on China.* (*That I personally know.) Is this a great week for China or what?

Tom Scocca: If you set aside the fact that all the American debt China owns is turning into junk bonds, then, yes, it's a happy time for the People's Republic. London, which did not have the foresight to strangle Twitter and Facebook, is being torn apart by riots, only a year before it is supposed to host the Olympics. The 50 Cent Army of China's government-backed Internet commenters is apparently having a parade to celebrate.

Choire: Today the "Wen Wei Paper" (sort of "News of the World" but with extra party cronyism) seems to be loudly saying that the U.S. owes every Chinese citizen 5700 yuan. (That would be $886.) Is this true? Do we???

Tom: Seems plausible. I've still got a few hundred yuan kicking around my desk drawer. That may turn out to be my most prudent investment holding.

Choire: You're an entry-level currency trader! Right, so not only is China making fun of our "downgrade," they are also making fun of the current "lawlessness" of London. Now, obviously, you were there in Beijing before the last Olympics. Were there chavs looting all the time?

Tom: There most emphatically were not. There was one person who stabbed an American to death at the Drum Tower, an event that was ascribed to insanity and quickly buried in the press, thanks to a total lack of information. And there was some sort of protester or streaker at the closing ceremony, likewise crazy, according to the best (only) available information. And the Free Tibet people climbed a flagpole early on. But beyond that, it was Harmonious Society 24/7. What's more: after the stabbing, they outlawed the sale of all kitchen knives throughout the city. We went to the newly opened upscale-kitchen-implements store, where they had like all the All-Clad equivalent cookware and silicone basting brushes a First World cook could hope to see, to get poultry shears to cut up food for the growing child, and the sharp-objects section had been swept clean.

Choire: That's the kind of harmony that countries like England and the U.S. have a hard time making happen. For instance, mandating alternate driving days with even and odd license plate numbers, as China did. But it seems to me that there is a very China-specific relationship to law and order. Let me quote from your book!

My first trip to the inner sanctum was for a press conference on forestry. On the way, we hit a traffic jam on the Second Ring. The left lane had closed to regular traffic, as one of the reserved Olympics lanes, and through some sort of traffic-engineering algebra, half as many private cars driving in two-thirds as many lanes worked out to much worse traffic than usual. When he saw me looking at my watch, the cabbie began fighting his way around the traffic, tapping his horn with his thumb. To keep demonstrating his concern, he continued tooting along the Third Ring when we got there, even though there was no Olympic lane and the traffic was fine.

"The Olympic things are only convenient for the Olympics," I said, in a flash of Mandarin competence. "For everyone else, they're annoying." The driver clapped a hand over his mouth and held it there theatrically. Then he put it back on the steering wheel. "Understand?" he said.

Choire: In America and in London, we'd just be loudly and grandly beefing about such things.

Tom: Would we really, though?

Choire: Hmm! Well we do not make jokes in airports, true.

Tom: Four years before those Olympics, you and I had the pleasure of seeing the Republican National Convention in New York, did we not?

Choire: I recall it well! Okay, I recall it hazily.

Tom: It might have been more memorable if the mayor had not locked up a few hundred would-be protesters before the whole event began.

Choire: Yes, the preemptive and illegal incarceration! That was not very "American." In which 1800 people were arrested, almost all of whom had charges dropped. (And charges of "resisting arrest" were fabricated.) Lawsuits, etc. Much, much more.

Tom: So these major made-for-TV events share a certain logic, all around the world.

Choire: And I can't imagine that London will be any less "vigilant," given that it is a near-total surveillance society, and that the 7/7 bombings were only six years ago.

Tom: Yes. The West sold China a lot of facial-recognition and crowd-behavior-processing surveillance software to help guarantee a peaceful Olympics.

Choire: That's nice of us! And in fact, you write, China also had designated protest zones: "During the games, an official announced, there would be official protest zones in three city parks. Reporters huddled up afterward to figure out where the third of the parks, World Park, which nobody had heard of, was located–halfway out to Hebei Province, it seemed. But the other two, Purple Bamboo Park and the Altar of the Sun Park, weren't bad."

Tom: Yes. And then the people who applied to use them were arrested.

Choire: Well that does have a certain logic.

Tom: It does. It is tidy. Ultimately, the I.O.C. endorsed that logic.

Choire: The IOC takes the Olympics max seriously. As a "China Expert," you have been doing things like TV and radio all over the fine United States of America. What sort of questions do you get asked? Are they… dumb?

Tom: Not at all.

Choire: I am shocked.

Tom: Many of the questions exist in a realm beyond "smart" or "dumb"; they are simply the questions that are out there being asked: "Is China really going to surpass the United States?"

Choire: Is China going to surpass the United States?

Tom: In what? Total surface area? We're tied, basically, depending on some tricky issues about how to count bodies of water.

Choire: Haha.

Tom: Population? China is already far ahead. Money? We're still ahead, there. There were, in fact, echoes of this in the Olympic medal count.

Choire: Oh right. There was much to-do.

Tom: China won! Also the United States won. China won 51 gold medals to the United States' 36. The United States won 110 medals to China's 100.

Choire: That's a lot of medals. And everyone gets to go home happy!

Tom: Yes. The Olympics doesn't specify how many "points" a medal is worth. If gold-silver-bronze gets scored 3-2-1, the United States gets more Medal Points and is the Olympic Winner.

Choire: USA! USA!

Tom: If it gets scored 5-3-1, China gets more Medal Points. 中国, 加油!

Choire: One of my favorite parts in the book is the press honcho lady for the Beijing Olympics talking about China's place in the world. Sort of viewing China as like, the world's younger adopted sibling, complete with the usual resentments and hurt feelings, and then getting all this attention. She said:

"The world is like a village and there are some rich residents, for example the United States, the UK, Germany, and China is... a poor villager, a poor villager in that village. And the Olympic Games is like a party, and many rich residents hosted these nice parties for the whole village, but China had never had a chance to do so, because China is not developed so well and has so many children, so many people to feed. And later China grew and the economy is better, and finally the rich residents said, 'OK, now we can ask China to host this party for us,' and China is very happy to have this opportunity, and we ask all the neighbors and all these relatives to come to help. We built a bigger house and we planted all the grasses and some people say, 'You are using chopsticks, and we are not used to it,' so we bought knives and forks, and we have also learned these languages, foreign languages, that our neighbors use... and we prepared many nice food and we welcome, we sincerely welcome all these villagers to come, but when they come they ignore all the nice things, the nice food that we put out, put on the table. They go to the... restroom, they go to the garbage bins, and they ignore all these nice preparations that we had put up...."

Tom: Yes. Why are we so negative all the time? So it's always diverting when China gets to flip the script, as it has this week, and deplore the Americans' reckless and incompetent government and the Britons' seething unhappiness and societal instability.

Choire: I have to say this is a great time for me to be rereading this book because America really is tearing itself apart in silly ways, like a teenager at its first therapy session, and North London is pretty much actually tearing itself apart. And China is like "mmm hmmmm."

Tom: China is like a very un-fuzzy therapist. It has absolutely no sympathy for our good intentions. "We are glad to see that you, too, appreciate the value of indefinite detention and torture in preserving your national security." "Surely you won't begrudge us the chance to use the same tools you do, to promote our own national interests."

Choire: Boris Johnson and Mike Bloomberg share this one world one dream!

Tom: Exactly. That was one of the central themes of this book, the more I watched the New Beijing present itself to the world. This belief that the spread of prosperity brings liberalization with it — well, does it? The notion that staging an Olympics makes you a member of the community of Good Nations is one small facet of this larger Pollyanna-internationalist ideology (or religion).

Choire: Right. SEE YOU IN LONDON!

Tom: Quite so. The Security State — now that's a value that all sorts of different governments can get behind.

Choire: And finally, on more meta questions: have you, now that you're an Author, found any way to deal with the problem of public readings?

Tom: Which... aspect of the problem?

Choire: Well, for the reader himself, maybe.

Tom: Standing up and reading the book in public is maybe less frightening than the prospect of other people reading the book in private.

Choire: Oh, I'd never thought of that! Great, new phobias for all.

Tom: At least you can hear the people chuckling or see them sneaking out the door.

Choire: Oof. But you can't see them throwing the book across the room at home.

Tom: Or reading it over and over and laughing out loud. You just do not know.

Choire: Not that your book is anything but engrossing and thrilling! "A VERY GOOD BOOK," says the Washington Post! Could a review be more concrete? Is the book good? Yes. How good? VERY.

Tom: And the Post shared lots of quotes, which is nice. If you enjoyed the text in this review, you can buy 100,000 more words of it!

Choire: Gosh that's a lot of words.

Tom: Beijing is a big city! But an endlessly diverting one. So maybe I was trying to be mimetic. I'll ask my publisher to add a scratch-and-sniff smog sample to the next printing. So everybody please hurry up and buy out this printing!

Choire: That would be incredibly… tasty?

Tom: But it is a very good book even without any interactive olfactory element. One odd thing about being an Author is that I find myself being less self-deprecatory than usual.

Choire: Oh! That's interesting. I always thought publishing a book would send a reasonable person into a deep shame spiral.

Tom: The shame spiral is maybe a bit of a luxury. I mean, we'd all love to be the early Jesus and Mary Chain, turning our backs on the audience, making 20 minutes of terrorizing feedback, and then skulking away. Or maybe the first-person plural is inaccurate there.

Choire: Ha! Well many of us would like to be that.

Tom: "Whatever! I wrote this. Like it, don't, fine with me, fuck you." But while a book is NOT AT ALL LIKE A BABY — I know this — one does feel responsible toward it, and protective.

Choire: Right. Babies are more expensive.

Tom: I did spend years working on this thing. And a publishing house got behind it, and many talented and rigorous editors and proofreaders went over the text, and the designer made a really great cover.

Choire: A REALLY GREAT COVER.

Tom: So being like, "Oh gosh, so awkward, no big deal, it's just some stuff I typed" — that feels a little cheap and bogus. I'd be kind of a jackass if I'd taken the money and spent this amount of time and I decided to be too shy or self-protective or whatever to say that I think it's good and I want people to buy it. I'm a writer, not a salesperson, but there isn't any more writing to be done on the book. And there is selling.

Tom: So, dear readers of The Awl, if you have gone this far through this dialogue, please do buy and read my book: BEIJING WELCOMES YOU: UNVEILING THE CAPITAL CITY OF THE FUTURE.

Choire: Well-played. Yes, as we said: the book tour goes to Brooklyn tonight! At 7 p.m. at the PowerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street, in Dumbo. Then tomorrow, August 10, at Politics & Prose, the party goes to Washington D.C., also at 7 p.m.

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

7 comments

]]> Tonight, at PowerHouse Arena, it is the Brooklyn Launch Party for Tom Scocca's Beijing Welcomes You, a nonfiction chronicle of what Beijing has so recently become. As China is now (well, as usual) so much in the news, we asked him some questions!

Choire Sicha: Tom Scocca, as you have written a book called Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future, which is brand new and good and also a book I have read, you are the only expert on China.* (*That I personally know.) Is this a great week for China or what?

Tom Scocca: If you set aside the fact that all the American debt China owns is turning into junk bonds, then, yes, it's a happy time for the People's Republic. London, which did not have the foresight to strangle Twitter and Facebook, is being torn apart by riots, only a year before it is supposed to host the Olympics. The 50 Cent Army of China's government-backed Internet commenters is apparently having a parade to celebrate.

Choire: Today the "Wen Wei Paper" (sort of "News of the World" but with extra party cronyism) seems to be loudly saying that the U.S. owes every Chinese citizen 5700 yuan. (That would be $886.) Is this true? Do we???

Tom: Seems plausible. I've still got a few hundred yuan kicking around my desk drawer. That may turn out to be my most prudent investment holding.

Choire: You're an entry-level currency trader! Right, so not only is China making fun of our "downgrade," they are also making fun of the current "lawlessness" of London. Now, obviously, you were there in Beijing before the last Olympics. Were there chavs looting all the time?

Tom: There most emphatically were not. There was one person who stabbed an American to death at the Drum Tower, an event that was ascribed to insanity and quickly buried in the press, thanks to a total lack of information. And there was some sort of protester or streaker at the closing ceremony, likewise crazy, according to the best (only) available information. And the Free Tibet people climbed a flagpole early on. But beyond that, it was Harmonious Society 24/7. What's more: after the stabbing, they outlawed the sale of all kitchen knives throughout the city. We went to the newly opened upscale-kitchen-implements store, where they had like all the All-Clad equivalent cookware and silicone basting brushes a First World cook could hope to see, to get poultry shears to cut up food for the growing child, and the sharp-objects section had been swept clean.

Choire: That's the kind of harmony that countries like England and the U.S. have a hard time making happen. For instance, mandating alternate driving days with even and odd license plate numbers, as China did. But it seems to me that there is a very China-specific relationship to law and order. Let me quote from your book!

My first trip to the inner sanctum was for a press conference on forestry. On the way, we hit a traffic jam on the Second Ring. The left lane had closed to regular traffic, as one of the reserved Olympics lanes, and through some sort of traffic-engineering algebra, half as many private cars driving in two-thirds as many lanes worked out to much worse traffic than usual. When he saw me looking at my watch, the cabbie began fighting his way around the traffic, tapping his horn with his thumb. To keep demonstrating his concern, he continued tooting along the Third Ring when we got there, even though there was no Olympic lane and the traffic was fine.

"The Olympic things are only convenient for the Olympics," I said, in a flash of Mandarin competence. "For everyone else, they're annoying." The driver clapped a hand over his mouth and held it there theatrically. Then he put it back on the steering wheel. "Understand?" he said.

Choire: In America and in London, we'd just be loudly and grandly beefing about such things.

Tom: Would we really, though?

Choire: Hmm! Well we do not make jokes in airports, true.

Tom: Four years before those Olympics, you and I had the pleasure of seeing the Republican National Convention in New York, did we not?

Choire: I recall it well! Okay, I recall it hazily.

Tom: It might have been more memorable if the mayor had not locked up a few hundred would-be protesters before the whole event began.

Choire: Yes, the preemptive and illegal incarceration! That was not very "American." In which 1800 people were arrested, almost all of whom had charges dropped. (And charges of "resisting arrest" were fabricated.) Lawsuits, etc. Much, much more.

Tom: So these major made-for-TV events share a certain logic, all around the world.

Choire: And I can't imagine that London will be any less "vigilant," given that it is a near-total surveillance society, and that the 7/7 bombings were only six years ago.

Tom: Yes. The West sold China a lot of facial-recognition and crowd-behavior-processing surveillance software to help guarantee a peaceful Olympics.

Choire: That's nice of us! And in fact, you write, China also had designated protest zones: "During the games, an official announced, there would be official protest zones in three city parks. Reporters huddled up afterward to figure out where the third of the parks, World Park, which nobody had heard of, was located–halfway out to Hebei Province, it seemed. But the other two, Purple Bamboo Park and the Altar of the Sun Park, weren't bad."

Tom: Yes. And then the people who applied to use them were arrested.

Choire: Well that does have a certain logic.

Tom: It does. It is tidy. Ultimately, the I.O.C. endorsed that logic.

Choire: The IOC takes the Olympics max seriously. As a "China Expert," you have been doing things like TV and radio all over the fine United States of America. What sort of questions do you get asked? Are they… dumb?

Tom: Not at all.

Choire: I am shocked.

Tom: Many of the questions exist in a realm beyond "smart" or "dumb"; they are simply the questions that are out there being asked: "Is China really going to surpass the United States?"

Choire: Is China going to surpass the United States?

Tom: In what? Total surface area? We're tied, basically, depending on some tricky issues about how to count bodies of water.

Choire: Haha.

Tom: Population? China is already far ahead. Money? We're still ahead, there. There were, in fact, echoes of this in the Olympic medal count.

Choire: Oh right. There was much to-do.

Tom: China won! Also the United States won. China won 51 gold medals to the United States' 36. The United States won 110 medals to China's 100.

Choire: That's a lot of medals. And everyone gets to go home happy!

Tom: Yes. The Olympics doesn't specify how many "points" a medal is worth. If gold-silver-bronze gets scored 3-2-1, the United States gets more Medal Points and is the Olympic Winner.

Choire: USA! USA!

Tom: If it gets scored 5-3-1, China gets more Medal Points. 中国, 加油!

Choire: One of my favorite parts in the book is the press honcho lady for the Beijing Olympics talking about China's place in the world. Sort of viewing China as like, the world's younger adopted sibling, complete with the usual resentments and hurt feelings, and then getting all this attention. She said:

"The world is like a village and there are some rich residents, for example the United States, the UK, Germany, and China is... a poor villager, a poor villager in that village. And the Olympic Games is like a party, and many rich residents hosted these nice parties for the whole village, but China had never had a chance to do so, because China is not developed so well and has so many children, so many people to feed. And later China grew and the economy is better, and finally the rich residents said, 'OK, now we can ask China to host this party for us,' and China is very happy to have this opportunity, and we ask all the neighbors and all these relatives to come to help. We built a bigger house and we planted all the grasses and some people say, 'You are using chopsticks, and we are not used to it,' so we bought knives and forks, and we have also learned these languages, foreign languages, that our neighbors use... and we prepared many nice food and we welcome, we sincerely welcome all these villagers to come, but when they come they ignore all the nice things, the nice food that we put out, put on the table. They go to the... restroom, they go to the garbage bins, and they ignore all these nice preparations that we had put up...."

Tom: Yes. Why are we so negative all the time? So it's always diverting when China gets to flip the script, as it has this week, and deplore the Americans' reckless and incompetent government and the Britons' seething unhappiness and societal instability.

Choire: I have to say this is a great time for me to be rereading this book because America really is tearing itself apart in silly ways, like a teenager at its first therapy session, and North London is pretty much actually tearing itself apart. And China is like "mmm hmmmm."

Tom: China is like a very un-fuzzy therapist. It has absolutely no sympathy for our good intentions. "We are glad to see that you, too, appreciate the value of indefinite detention and torture in preserving your national security." "Surely you won't begrudge us the chance to use the same tools you do, to promote our own national interests."

Choire: Boris Johnson and Mike Bloomberg share this one world one dream!

Tom: Exactly. That was one of the central themes of this book, the more I watched the New Beijing present itself to the world. This belief that the spread of prosperity brings liberalization with it — well, does it? The notion that staging an Olympics makes you a member of the community of Good Nations is one small facet of this larger Pollyanna-internationalist ideology (or religion).

Choire: Right. SEE YOU IN LONDON!

Tom: Quite so. The Security State — now that's a value that all sorts of different governments can get behind.

Choire: And finally, on more meta questions: have you, now that you're an Author, found any way to deal with the problem of public readings?

Tom: Which... aspect of the problem?

Choire: Well, for the reader himself, maybe.

Tom: Standing up and reading the book in public is maybe less frightening than the prospect of other people reading the book in private.

Choire: Oh, I'd never thought of that! Great, new phobias for all.

Tom: At least you can hear the people chuckling or see them sneaking out the door.

Choire: Oof. But you can't see them throwing the book across the room at home.

Tom: Or reading it over and over and laughing out loud. You just do not know.

Choire: Not that your book is anything but engrossing and thrilling! "A VERY GOOD BOOK," says the Washington Post! Could a review be more concrete? Is the book good? Yes. How good? VERY.

Tom: And the Post shared lots of quotes, which is nice. If you enjoyed the text in this review, you can buy 100,000 more words of it!

Choire: Gosh that's a lot of words.

Tom: Beijing is a big city! But an endlessly diverting one. So maybe I was trying to be mimetic. I'll ask my publisher to add a scratch-and-sniff smog sample to the next printing. So everybody please hurry up and buy out this printing!

Choire: That would be incredibly… tasty?

Tom: But it is a very good book even without any interactive olfactory element. One odd thing about being an Author is that I find myself being less self-deprecatory than usual.

Choire: Oh! That's interesting. I always thought publishing a book would send a reasonable person into a deep shame spiral.

Tom: The shame spiral is maybe a bit of a luxury. I mean, we'd all love to be the early Jesus and Mary Chain, turning our backs on the audience, making 20 minutes of terrorizing feedback, and then skulking away. Or maybe the first-person plural is inaccurate there.

Choire: Ha! Well many of us would like to be that.

Tom: "Whatever! I wrote this. Like it, don't, fine with me, fuck you." But while a book is NOT AT ALL LIKE A BABY — I know this — one does feel responsible toward it, and protective.

Choire: Right. Babies are more expensive.

Tom: I did spend years working on this thing. And a publishing house got behind it, and many talented and rigorous editors and proofreaders went over the text, and the designer made a really great cover.

Choire: A REALLY GREAT COVER.

Tom: So being like, "Oh gosh, so awkward, no big deal, it's just some stuff I typed" — that feels a little cheap and bogus. I'd be kind of a jackass if I'd taken the money and spent this amount of time and I decided to be too shy or self-protective or whatever to say that I think it's good and I want people to buy it. I'm a writer, not a salesperson, but there isn't any more writing to be done on the book. And there is selling.

Tom: So, dear readers of The Awl, if you have gone this far through this dialogue, please do buy and read my book: BEIJING WELCOMES YOU: UNVEILING THE CAPITAL CITY OF THE FUTURE.

Choire: Well-played. Yes, as we said: the book tour goes to Brooklyn tonight! At 7 p.m. at the PowerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street, in Dumbo. Then tomorrow, August 10, at Politics & Prose, the party goes to Washington D.C., also at 7 p.m.

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

7 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/what-can-china-teach-london-about-a-harmonious-society/feed 7 I Used To Be Dumb, Now I'm An Expert http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/i-used-to-be-dumb-now-im-an-expert http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/i-used-to-be-dumb-now-im-an-expert#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 13:20:00 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/i-used-to-be-dumb-now-im-an-expert "The mystery of political conversion narratives is why claiming that you used to believe the wrong thing, because you were stupid, moves you to the front of the line to talk about the new, correct thing that you believe, now that you are smart."

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]]> "The mystery of political conversion narratives is why claiming that you used to believe the wrong thing, because you were stupid, moves you to the front of the line to talk about the new, correct thing that you believe, now that you are smart."

---

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1 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/i-used-to-be-dumb-now-im-an-expert/feed 1 Six Writers Tell All About Covers and Blurbs http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/six-writers-tell-all-about-covers-and-blurbs http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/six-writers-tell-all-about-covers-and-blurbs#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:00:10 +0000 Matthew Gallaway http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/six-writers-tell-all-about-covers-and-blurbs Writers by definition spend a lot of time on the inside of books, which is why what happens on the outside—namely, cover art and blurbs—can feel precarious and daunting. Often these elements are beyond an author’s control or expertise, which can be painful to admit, particularly when the "expertise" of graphic designers and marketers seems so subjective or at odds with an author’s “vision” for a book.

To get some advice on navigating these issues, we asked a handful of writers—including Kate Christensen, Bennett Madison, Stefanie Pintoff, Mark Jude Poirier and Tom Scocca—who have been through the process these questions:

  • How important are covers in terms of selling a book?

  • Have your publishers asked you for your opinion or “input” on your covers, and to what extent do you think they listened? Did you ever meet with the designer? How important was “marketing” in making decisions about the cover of your book(s)?

  • Did you ever receive a cover that made you unhappy and if so, what did you do about it? Did you ultimately end up with a cover that made you happier?

  • How important are blurbs, particularly for a first-time author?

  • How did you go about getting your blurbs? Did your agent or editor help, or did you rely more on personal connections?

  • Have you ever offered someone else a blurb?

Let's get started!



Kate Christensen
I'm much more interested in words than images. I look at covers, of course, but am never swayed one way or the other by them. A great one can pique my interest, but if a cover is mediocre or even bad, it wouldn't prevent me from reading the flap copy, the first sentences and the back cover.

I've been contractually permitted to weigh in with an opinion on all of my covers, paperback and hardcover; sometimes my opinion causes changes, sometimes not. My editor has the final say; he and I have disagreed, and he always wins. I've never met with a designer or contributed to the concept of a cover, except for my most recent book, The Astral, whose title refers to an actual apartment building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I suggested using a photo of the building, but I'm sure they could have come up with that on their own.

The cover for the hardback of Trouble made me unhappy, but no one would budge on it, so there it stayed. My mother thought it was a picture of me; I thought it was flat-out weird. I still dislike it.

I honestly have no idea how important blurbs are for the general reading public. Knowing what I know, whenever I see a blurb, I immediately assume the writer is friends with that person or has studied with them or babysat their kids—or slept with them or is blackmailing them or has a gun to their head. In other words, I give blurbs no credence whatsoever.

Two close friends blurbed my first novel. I am forever in their debt, and I found the whole process a bit humiliating. No strangers were willing to blurb me on the strength of the book itself, and my editor asked many people, far and wide. The whole thing made me feel jaundiced and annoyed.

My later books were beautifully blurbed by a several generous fellow writers I barely knew—people I now adore and feel indebted to, although I still barely know them.

I happily, freely offer and write blurbs for everyone I know or sort of know or who know people I know, and even people I don't know if I like their books, which, come to think of it, disproves my assumption that all blurbs are personal. I write blurbs for books I like and people I like.

I wish I had known that publishing a novel is a crapshoot from start to finish. If you're lucky enough to get a book into print, you may not be lucky enough to be blurbed, reviewed or read. If no one blurbs you, it just means you don't know any writers more successful than you are. Don't take it personally. That's the best advice for a writer, the key to an even-keel sanity with regard to the whole business—don't take anything personally.

Kate Christensen's new novel, The Astral, will be published on June 14.




Bennett Madison
I think covers literally are the only thing that matters. Maybe store placement and co-op also matters but I have certainly never gotten co-op so I wouldn't know.

Generally, your publisher asks what you think after it's finished and too late to actually change much. Then you can ask for little adjustments. “Marketing” of course is very important in the same abstract way that astrology is very important. By the way, I know a person who has it written into her contracts that her book can't be released while Mercury is in retrograde. Which at first seems brilliant, but then it makes me think that maybe that means all the lead-up stuff is during Mercury retrograde which might even be worse so I guess there's nothing you can do.

I absolutely hated the cover of my first book. I complained a little and they changed it enough to make me hate it so much more! So the moral of the story there is, no matter how bad it is it can always be made worse with hot-pink "I Dream of Jeannie" harem pants.

I also had a cover that I loved which had to be changed at the very last minute because some “very important people” didn't like it. As a result the book got delayed by a year and was published with a new cover that I guess I liked okay but seems in retrospect like maybe it didn't represent the book well. Of course, because of the haphazard way publishing works, the original cover that was never actually produced is still all over the Internet, etc. And the new cover didn't sell at all. The moral of this story is, who cares?

I have no idea about blurbs. It seems like they are probably not that important. Maybe it would matter if you got blurbed by someone really giant like JK Rowling or Michelle Obama but who knows. I suspect they matter more for reviews and awards and that kind of thing than they do for sales to actual consumers. (Assuming actual consumers exist.)

A lot of times I think blurbs are just for the writer's ego, 'cause like, you get to ask people you admire to blurb your stuff and then if they do it you can feel all pleased with yourself, which is nice when it happens.

I didn't get blurbs for my first couple of books. I don't know why; no one ever mentioned it to me and I had no idea what I was doing. I guess since my first few books are, like, light mysteries no one thought it was necessary. But I mean, we could have gotten blurbs from other people who wrote chick lit mystery-type stuff? I have no idea why we didn't. I have a feeling it had something to do with someone being a total idiot. Perhaps me!

For my most recent book, which I did get blurbs for, I went about it in a very haphazard way. My editor and I never made a big list or had a big conversation about it or anything. I just sent out a few emails. A few people turned me down with very good excuses, which didn't bother me. A few people never responded to my very nice e-mail requests, which those people if you're reading this, yes, I will secretly hold that against you forever.

I know there's supposed to be this whole very strict etiquette about asking for blurbs, but no one can actually agree on what that etiquette is, so it's not very useful. It seems like certain people want the request delivered on a velvet pillow on top of a silver platter by an emissary from an outside accounting firm or whatever. Get over yourself. If you have a personal relationship with someone you should be able to ask for a blurb under the condition that you accept a "no" very gracefully.

My editor asked a few people I didn't know personally on my behalf also, which some of those people said yes and I guess some of them didn't. I probably should have been on my editor’s case about it more, because there were a few people I was really hoping for and I don't know what happened there and I never really asked.

People have asked me to blurb, which is always very shocking because it seems like you should only try to get blurbs from people who are at least marginally well-known, which I'm not. Anyway, it's very flattering and does indeed make me feel like a “real writer.” And yes, I have given blurbs to those people who have asked. And yes, I loved their books. But anyone who claims that people don't blurb books they hate all the time for various reasons of politics is a huge liar.

Bennett Madison is the author of several books, including The Blonde of the Joke.




Stefanie Pintoff
Three aspects of a book make the greatest first impression on potential readers. The opening sentence. The title. And, of course, the cover. If the cover art does its job well, it will portray the tone and genre of the book accurately—and help it stand out from its competition on the bookshelf. Although one can't help but wonder whether the meteoric rise of the e-book will diminish the importance of the cover in a reader's decision to "pick up a book" and explore its first few pages.

As writers, we can have very different levels of involvement in the process. Most of us don’t have “ cover approval” in our contracts (though huge bestselling authors may get that eventually). My own contract calls for “cover consulting,” which is more typical. Even so, what that means can vary from house to house, and from book to book. Ideally, we’ll feel part of an open exchange of ideas—and end up with a cover that reflects our shared vision of the novel.

I was fortunate with the cover art for my first book, a historical mystery set in early 1900s NYC. Though I wasn’t involved at the level of design or marketing meetings, my publisher made me feel part of the process when my editor and I discussed issues of mood, color and theme. I passed along sample photographs that had the right tone. And when I first saw cover artist David Rotstein’s product, I felt it was absolutely perfect. He had taken a central landmark near the lake in Central Park, the Angel of the Waters, and transformed it with color and background to suit my novel. That first cover transformed even the way I felt about my title. I’d been ambivalent about In the Shadow of Gotham and wouldn’t have been surprised had marketing told me to find something new. But the moment I saw the title emblazoned on the cover, in just the right font, I loved it.

In a series, continuity is important. Once the theme for my series was set, additional covers followed along the same lines, varying only in color choice and specific NYC settings. I love my covers, and think they also work from a marketing perspective. And covers are very much the domain of marketing. They target major buyers as much as end-readers. It’s a fact that buyers for the chain stores will order more copies of a book they find visually appealing, so their opinion counts, even to the extent that publishers will entirely change a book’s cover if an influential buyer doesn’t like it.

Turning to blurbs, I believe they can be very helpful to debut novels, for which of course there are no reviews in place. The best blurbs come from an author writing within the same genre, since they will take advantage of a shared audience. For example, for a thriller debut, a blurb from Michael Connelly or Lee Child is an instant attention-getter and lends an air of credibility to the book. Authors can be very busy, so connections matter (sharing an agent or editor for example). In my case, my editor was responsible for my early blurbs—and I was grateful.

There are so many people who have been instrumental to my success as a writer. I know that without their advice and support, my career would have been very different. I regularly give blurbs to other authors. Especially, debut mystery writers. Of course, I benefit as well, since it’s another way of getting my own name in front of a potential audience. And, it provides me a legitimate excuse to put down my laptop and pursue my favorite hobby—sitting down with a good book.

Stefanie Pintoff is an Edgar award-winning mystery novelist whose work has also won the Washington Irving Book Prize and earned nominations for the Anthony, Macavity and Agatha awards.




Mark Jude Poirier
I think covers are extremely important. The cover of your first book is like your wedding dress if you’re a woman: You want it to represent who you are, but you want it to make you look much better than you normally do. And you only get one first book. I can’t think of an apt metaphor for men. Your first book cover is like… I don’t know, your first car? This is a futile exercise in gender normativity, anyway, so I’ll move on.

You should definitely have input into the cover’s design, and your publisher should facilitate and encourage this input. If your publisher is being cagey, get your agent involved. For me, my publishers (the Crown division of Random House and the Miramax division of Hyperion) sent me several mock-ups from which to choose. I was with Crown for my first book, and they allowed me to search for an image I thought might be appropriate for my book’s jacket. They didn’t ultimately use that image, but they used one by the same photographer that I actually preferred to the one I had found.

My experiences with Miramax were different. I loved the cover they chose for Goats for which they had asked my input. I also loved the cover they chose for Unsung Heroes of American Industry. Again, I had some input. The cover they chose for Modern Ranch Living, however, sucked and continues to suck today. They had sent me a bunch of mock-ups, some of them very cool, very compelling. Some of them were inappropriate. The novel takes place in Tucson, Arizona and one of their mock-ups featured a photo of a strange mammal that only lives in the deserts of Australia or Africa or somewhere that isn’t Arizona. I told them which mock-ups I liked and why, but they ultimately chose a bland and way-too-literal photograph of a curvy-road-ahead highway sign in the desert. I’m not sure why this happened, but I have a theory. First off, my editor left Miramax Books before the novel was released, just before the cover was chosen. She had been much more than an editor—she was my publicist and friend, and she had made sure that my opinions were considered in the creation of my covers. And I trusted her. When she moved on, my main contact became my publicist, who rarely returned calls or emails and ended up quitting Miramax Books in the middle of my book tour. I imagine he just lost the mock-ups and didn’t bother to tell anyone until it was too late, and a clueless 19-year-old NYU intern chose my cover on her first day in the chaotic offices. And now I’m left with this crappy cover for my fourth—and I believe my best—book. Cry me a river.

I certainly wouldn’t pick up Modern Ranch Living in the bookstore. The bland cover screams bland novel. Actually, it doesn’t scream anything. It mumbles. I have bought books based on their covers alone, and about 85 percent of the time, I’ve found that an interesting and compelling cover means an interesting and compelling read. Take the hardback edition of Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way, for instance. The Knopf book features a stark photograph of three packets of Chinese food sauces. I remember seeing this book in Prairie Lights in Iowa City, picking it up because of its cover, and shelling out the twenty-one dollars for it—which was a lot of money for a graduate student in 1996. I had no idea who Gary Lutz was. There were no blurbs on the book, just this intriguing and weird and stark cover, which was designed by Archie Ferguson. Lutz’s stories were as intriguing and weird and stark as the cover. Genius.

Bloomsbury publishes my books in the UK, and while I’ve had no real input in cover selection, those people across the Atlantic really know how to churn out great design. They’ve come up with eight covers for my four books, none of which I’ve objected to, and all of which I’ve liked.

I offered cover ideas to people at Simon and Schuster for The Worst Years of Your Life, an anthology I edited, and I’m grateful they went in another direction. The cover they chose features a diagram of a frog dissection that looks as if it were made on a '70s ditto machine. Created by Catherine Casalino, the cover went on to win design awards. While I approved the cover and approved the covers from Bloomsbury, it took me a while to believe that sometimes book-jacket designers, people who actually get paid to design book jackets, people who actually have a lot of experience designing book jackets, often know better than I. Because of my sour experience with Modern Ranch Living, I’m a little touchy, but I have come to let the experts do their jobs.

Just above, I mentioned that I bought Stories in the Worst Way, a book with no blurbs, but I do think blurbs are important. I read blurbs in bookstores. A blurb from an author I admire might seduce me into buying the book. A blurb from an author whose work I dislike can make me leave the book on the shelf. A blurb from an author I actually know and dislike on a personal level—usually based on their abhorrent behavior in graduate school—means I will turn the book backward on the shelf in the bookstore or hide it under a stack of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue.

Asking for blurbs is humiliating and horrible. If your editor and or publicist can do it for you, you’re lucky. If left on your own, ask writer friends or professors. Because I know how awkward it is to ask for blurbs, this is what I usually say when I’m asked to blurb someone’s book: “I’d be happy to blurb your book, but are you sure you don’t want to ask someone with a fan base that isn’t limited to his mother’s book club?” If you ask someone for a blurb, and they write you a decent one, use it! I once was asked to write a blurb for a friend so I diligently reread his novel—I had read earlier drafts. He didn’t use my blurb, which was a good blurb, damn it! I would have understood if my blurb had been knocked off the jacket by blurbs from Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie and Annie Proulx, but no; my blurb was knocked off by blurbs from writers just as obscure as I am. Feelings check: hurt.

Choosing a cover and gathering blurbs for your first book should be a fun and exciting time, but chances are someone along the way will let you down. Because publishing your first book usually takes quite a while and a lot of hard work, it’s easy to think that you don’t have control over anything that happens. You do. You just have to ask, and maybe be a little pushier than you’re comfortable being.

Mark Jude Poirier is the author of four books of fiction and several screenplays. You can order the UK versions of his books that have much better covers than the American versions here.




Tom Scocca
I assume covers are very important. This might just be a superstition or a way of hedging—sure, there must be some cause-and-effect relationship between some feature of the book and whether or not people buy it, right? But I'm a primitive reader and I judge books by their covers all the time.

My relationship with the cover of my own book is unusual and might be unprecedented. I have not heard from any authors who have had a similar experience. Here is what happened: the publisher sent me a mock-up of the cover for Beijing Welcomes You, and it was perfect. I mean, it was exactly appropriate for the book I had written. No, more than that: if I'm remembering the timeline right, the cover design unmistakably echoed the structure of the book's epilogue—which I had not even turned in yet. The editor tells me it was done by Riverhead's Helen Yentus and Alex Merto. I had no input whatsoever, and I could not be happier with the result.

I have no idea whether blurbs influence readers or not. My publisher believes they are part of the process, and I choose to believe what my publisher tells me. Thinking about blurbs activates the part of my monkey brain that's wired up for seeing the shadow of an eagle while crossing open ground: EXPOSURE TO DEATH-RISK! FLEE! I have been led to understand that this is the normal mindset of writers in blurb season; at least, my publisher was willing to pretend that the minutes-long wincing silences that punctuated our meeting about blurbs were perfectly ordinary behavior.

Even as writers go, I think, I am terrible at asking people for things. Also at networking with other writers. I have gotten two blurbs so far on my own, by which I mean I sort of talked to the only two people I know who are famous writers, and I mentioned that the book was written, and they volunteered to blurb it, at which point I got Riverhead to send each one a galley and a note formally making the awful request. My agent has shaken one or two more loose from somewhere, I gather. And the publisher had worked up a little list of other people to ask. Maybe some of them have now read the galley and liked it, and they'll want to endorse the book, because they want to inspire other people to share the experience. That is how it works, isn't it?

All I really remember from the whole conversation at Riverhead about getting blurbs is an exchange that went something like this:

PUBLISHER: What about [BRAND-NAME BESTSELLING AUTHOR]?

ME: [Wince.]

PUBLISHER: Uh-oh, did you write something about him?

ME: [Nod.]

PUBLISHER: OK, not him.

ME: Maybe he'll be a grown-up about that!

PUBLISHER: He won't.

I probably failed to think of a half dozen people who would have been willing and able to write a blurb. If my own mother were Oprah Winfrey, I'd have skipped her and been like, "Well, who says she'd necessarily like this book?" Here's how dysfunctional my relationship with self-promotion is: when I was in college, my roommate and I started a magazine. Someone at some point was like, "You guys"—I don't even think it was that direct, more like "These guys"—"These guys are just doing this to put it on their résumés." And so two years later, when I was writing my résumé, I left the magazine off, just because, screw you.

So, anyway, if you are reading this, and you like my writing, and you are a published author, I would be honored and delighted if you would blurb my book, and the only reason I didn't ask you was that I didn't want to be annoying. Seriously, there is still time. Tscocca at gmail dot com. I'll send you a galley.

(I had to get up and walk around before I could bring myself to write that paragraph.)

I've never offered anyone else a blurb, because right now, my blurbs would be worthless. That's not neurotic modesty; it's how the currency works. Until your own book has been published, you don't exist.

Tom Scocca writes the "Scocca on Slate" blog. His first book, Beijing Welcomes You is due out in August.





Matthew Gallaway
I remember feeling a little sick when my agent told me in no uncertain terms that the cover is “the most important part” of a book, and I felt even sicker when he ended our discussion about blurbs by declaring that the process was “war.”

As for my cover, I was asked for absolutely no input, but as it turned out, I genuinely loved what my editor sent to me. The only changes that were subsequently made—after consulting with my agent—was to change the font. Although I never would have thought of it myself, I think it was an excellent idea, and helped to make the cover more “readable.” (You can judge for yourself.) I was equally excited recently to get the paperback version, which also arrived without any input from yours truly. Short version: I consider myself very lucky in terms of covers.

As for blurbs, I think it’s a horrible, ugly word, and I try not to use it in polite conversation, even going so far as to substitute the pompous “endorsement.” (Much the way I feel about using “gig” in the context of indie rock, which yeah, no.) Try saying “blurb” a few times without feeling humiliated and embarrassed: there, you see what I mean? Unfortunately, I think blurbs are important, less from a consumer-perspective than in terms of building “buzz” within a publisher, specifically helping to get the marketing and sales “on board.” That said, getting the blurbs almost gave me a nervous breakdown, because I didn’t know any “real writers.” For the first time, I felt sorry not to have an MFA (and the connections to potential blurbers it seems to bring) and even less logically about getting a C+ in my creative-writing class in my sophomore year of college, as a result of watching literally 99 percent of the network coverage of the 1988 Winter Olympics, which wouldn’t have been so bad except I somehow managed not to “get rid of” my television until May, at which point I was pretty much a zombie, academically speaking. I also regretted writing some nasty blog reviews about books written by prominent nonheterosexual novelists ___ and ___, which leads to my one piece of advice to unpublished authors on this subject: don’t waste time tearing down books you hate; focus on what you love, because it’s actually pretty difficult to scrub old blog posts from the Internet, as I learned the hard way lol. The last thing the world needs is another asshole critic, and if the time comes when you’re asking around for blurbs, trust me, you’ll regret being that asshole.

I did send out hand-written requests to perhaps 10,000-15,000 of my favorite authors, including a few gay ones, one of whom was kind enough to write back saying that he “never” blurbs books, even those written by nonheterosexual debut novelists, a “solidarity card” I had been very naively hoping to play. (Note: just because gay writers have generally been ignored and abused and suffocated for the past century doesn’t mean that if you’re a gay writer you’ll be welcomed with a trumpet fanfare and red carpet through the gilded gates of the “literary community,” gay or otherwise; if anything you’ll be viewed MORE harshly by gay writers for reasons that probably are more deserving of sympathy than scorn, although as mentioned above I regret to say I’ve not always been able to resist the latter impulse, although I like to think I’m much better than I used to be.) As it turned out, the blurbs I received came either by way of connections to my agent or editor, or—for the two I procured myself—fellow denizens of the blogosphere. I will say that there was no connection I did not attempt to exploit, no matter how remote, and I still feel a bit “whored-out” from the whole experience. (Which is no reason not to do it; just brace yourself, is what I’m saying.) Happily, in every case the “endorsements” came from writers whose work I greatly admired and had written kind things about on my blog (see note above regarding not being an a-hole.)

Matthew Gallaway is the author of The Metropolis Case. He would like to thank Maud Newton, Ed Sien, and Mark Longaker for their help in curating this edition of Publishing School. He promises to “blurb the shit” out of anyone who asks nicely.

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32 comments

]]> Writers by definition spend a lot of time on the inside of books, which is why what happens on the outside—namely, cover art and blurbs—can feel precarious and daunting. Often these elements are beyond an author’s control or expertise, which can be painful to admit, particularly when the "expertise" of graphic designers and marketers seems so subjective or at odds with an author’s “vision” for a book.

To get some advice on navigating these issues, we asked a handful of writers—including Kate Christensen, Bennett Madison, Stefanie Pintoff, Mark Jude Poirier and Tom Scocca—who have been through the process these questions:

  • How important are covers in terms of selling a book?

  • Have your publishers asked you for your opinion or “input” on your covers, and to what extent do you think they listened? Did you ever meet with the designer? How important was “marketing” in making decisions about the cover of your book(s)?

  • Did you ever receive a cover that made you unhappy and if so, what did you do about it? Did you ultimately end up with a cover that made you happier?

  • How important are blurbs, particularly for a first-time author?

  • How did you go about getting your blurbs? Did your agent or editor help, or did you rely more on personal connections?

  • Have you ever offered someone else a blurb?

Let's get started!



Kate Christensen
I'm much more interested in words than images. I look at covers, of course, but am never swayed one way or the other by them. A great one can pique my interest, but if a cover is mediocre or even bad, it wouldn't prevent me from reading the flap copy, the first sentences and the back cover.

I've been contractually permitted to weigh in with an opinion on all of my covers, paperback and hardcover; sometimes my opinion causes changes, sometimes not. My editor has the final say; he and I have disagreed, and he always wins. I've never met with a designer or contributed to the concept of a cover, except for my most recent book, The Astral, whose title refers to an actual apartment building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I suggested using a photo of the building, but I'm sure they could have come up with that on their own.

The cover for the hardback of Trouble made me unhappy, but no one would budge on it, so there it stayed. My mother thought it was a picture of me; I thought it was flat-out weird. I still dislike it.

I honestly have no idea how important blurbs are for the general reading public. Knowing what I know, whenever I see a blurb, I immediately assume the writer is friends with that person or has studied with them or babysat their kids—or slept with them or is blackmailing them or has a gun to their head. In other words, I give blurbs no credence whatsoever.

Two close friends blurbed my first novel. I am forever in their debt, and I found the whole process a bit humiliating. No strangers were willing to blurb me on the strength of the book itself, and my editor asked many people, far and wide. The whole thing made me feel jaundiced and annoyed.

My later books were beautifully blurbed by a several generous fellow writers I barely knew—people I now adore and feel indebted to, although I still barely know them.

I happily, freely offer and write blurbs for everyone I know or sort of know or who know people I know, and even people I don't know if I like their books, which, come to think of it, disproves my assumption that all blurbs are personal. I write blurbs for books I like and people I like.

I wish I had known that publishing a novel is a crapshoot from start to finish. If you're lucky enough to get a book into print, you may not be lucky enough to be blurbed, reviewed or read. If no one blurbs you, it just means you don't know any writers more successful than you are. Don't take it personally. That's the best advice for a writer, the key to an even-keel sanity with regard to the whole business—don't take anything personally.

Kate Christensen's new novel, The Astral, will be published on June 14.




Bennett Madison
I think covers literally are the only thing that matters. Maybe store placement and co-op also matters but I have certainly never gotten co-op so I wouldn't know.

Generally, your publisher asks what you think after it's finished and too late to actually change much. Then you can ask for little adjustments. “Marketing” of course is very important in the same abstract way that astrology is very important. By the way, I know a person who has it written into her contracts that her book can't be released while Mercury is in retrograde. Which at first seems brilliant, but then it makes me think that maybe that means all the lead-up stuff is during Mercury retrograde which might even be worse so I guess there's nothing you can do.

I absolutely hated the cover of my first book. I complained a little and they changed it enough to make me hate it so much more! So the moral of the story there is, no matter how bad it is it can always be made worse with hot-pink "I Dream of Jeannie" harem pants.

I also had a cover that I loved which had to be changed at the very last minute because some “very important people” didn't like it. As a result the book got delayed by a year and was published with a new cover that I guess I liked okay but seems in retrospect like maybe it didn't represent the book well. Of course, because of the haphazard way publishing works, the original cover that was never actually produced is still all over the Internet, etc. And the new cover didn't sell at all. The moral of this story is, who cares?

I have no idea about blurbs. It seems like they are probably not that important. Maybe it would matter if you got blurbed by someone really giant like JK Rowling or Michelle Obama but who knows. I suspect they matter more for reviews and awards and that kind of thing than they do for sales to actual consumers. (Assuming actual consumers exist.)

A lot of times I think blurbs are just for the writer's ego, 'cause like, you get to ask people you admire to blurb your stuff and then if they do it you can feel all pleased with yourself, which is nice when it happens.

I didn't get blurbs for my first couple of books. I don't know why; no one ever mentioned it to me and I had no idea what I was doing. I guess since my first few books are, like, light mysteries no one thought it was necessary. But I mean, we could have gotten blurbs from other people who wrote chick lit mystery-type stuff? I have no idea why we didn't. I have a feeling it had something to do with someone being a total idiot. Perhaps me!

For my most recent book, which I did get blurbs for, I went about it in a very haphazard way. My editor and I never made a big list or had a big conversation about it or anything. I just sent out a few emails. A few people turned me down with very good excuses, which didn't bother me. A few people never responded to my very nice e-mail requests, which those people if you're reading this, yes, I will secretly hold that against you forever.

I know there's supposed to be this whole very strict etiquette about asking for blurbs, but no one can actually agree on what that etiquette is, so it's not very useful. It seems like certain people want the request delivered on a velvet pillow on top of a silver platter by an emissary from an outside accounting firm or whatever. Get over yourself. If you have a personal relationship with someone you should be able to ask for a blurb under the condition that you accept a "no" very gracefully.

My editor asked a few people I didn't know personally on my behalf also, which some of those people said yes and I guess some of them didn't. I probably should have been on my editor’s case about it more, because there were a few people I was really hoping for and I don't know what happened there and I never really asked.

People have asked me to blurb, which is always very shocking because it seems like you should only try to get blurbs from people who are at least marginally well-known, which I'm not. Anyway, it's very flattering and does indeed make me feel like a “real writer.” And yes, I have given blurbs to those people who have asked. And yes, I loved their books. But anyone who claims that people don't blurb books they hate all the time for various reasons of politics is a huge liar.

Bennett Madison is the author of several books, including The Blonde of the Joke.




Stefanie Pintoff
Three aspects of a book make the greatest first impression on potential readers. The opening sentence. The title. And, of course, the cover. If the cover art does its job well, it will portray the tone and genre of the book accurately—and help it stand out from its competition on the bookshelf. Although one can't help but wonder whether the meteoric rise of the e-book will diminish the importance of the cover in a reader's decision to "pick up a book" and explore its first few pages.

As writers, we can have very different levels of involvement in the process. Most of us don’t have “ cover approval” in our contracts (though huge bestselling authors may get that eventually). My own contract calls for “cover consulting,” which is more typical. Even so, what that means can vary from house to house, and from book to book. Ideally, we’ll feel part of an open exchange of ideas—and end up with a cover that reflects our shared vision of the novel.

I was fortunate with the cover art for my first book, a historical mystery set in early 1900s NYC. Though I wasn’t involved at the level of design or marketing meetings, my publisher made me feel part of the process when my editor and I discussed issues of mood, color and theme. I passed along sample photographs that had the right tone. And when I first saw cover artist David Rotstein’s product, I felt it was absolutely perfect. He had taken a central landmark near the lake in Central Park, the Angel of the Waters, and transformed it with color and background to suit my novel. That first cover transformed even the way I felt about my title. I’d been ambivalent about In the Shadow of Gotham and wouldn’t have been surprised had marketing told me to find something new. But the moment I saw the title emblazoned on the cover, in just the right font, I loved it.

In a series, continuity is important. Once the theme for my series was set, additional covers followed along the same lines, varying only in color choice and specific NYC settings. I love my covers, and think they also work from a marketing perspective. And covers are very much the domain of marketing. They target major buyers as much as end-readers. It’s a fact that buyers for the chain stores will order more copies of a book they find visually appealing, so their opinion counts, even to the extent that publishers will entirely change a book’s cover if an influential buyer doesn’t like it.

Turning to blurbs, I believe they can be very helpful to debut novels, for which of course there are no reviews in place. The best blurbs come from an author writing within the same genre, since they will take advantage of a shared audience. For example, for a thriller debut, a blurb from Michael Connelly or Lee Child is an instant attention-getter and lends an air of credibility to the book. Authors can be very busy, so connections matter (sharing an agent or editor for example). In my case, my editor was responsible for my early blurbs—and I was grateful.

There are so many people who have been instrumental to my success as a writer. I know that without their advice and support, my career would have been very different. I regularly give blurbs to other authors. Especially, debut mystery writers. Of course, I benefit as well, since it’s another way of getting my own name in front of a potential audience. And, it provides me a legitimate excuse to put down my laptop and pursue my favorite hobby—sitting down with a good book.

Stefanie Pintoff is an Edgar award-winning mystery novelist whose work has also won the Washington Irving Book Prize and earned nominations for the Anthony, Macavity and Agatha awards.




Mark Jude Poirier
I think covers are extremely important. The cover of your first book is like your wedding dress if you’re a woman: You want it to represent who you are, but you want it to make you look much better than you normally do. And you only get one first book. I can’t think of an apt metaphor for men. Your first book cover is like… I don’t know, your first car? This is a futile exercise in gender normativity, anyway, so I’ll move on.

You should definitely have input into the cover’s design, and your publisher should facilitate and encourage this input. If your publisher is being cagey, get your agent involved. For me, my publishers (the Crown division of Random House and the Miramax division of Hyperion) sent me several mock-ups from which to choose. I was with Crown for my first book, and they allowed me to search for an image I thought might be appropriate for my book’s jacket. They didn’t ultimately use that image, but they used one by the same photographer that I actually preferred to the one I had found.

My experiences with Miramax were different. I loved the cover they chose for Goats for which they had asked my input. I also loved the cover they chose for Unsung Heroes of American Industry. Again, I had some input. The cover they chose for Modern Ranch Living, however, sucked and continues to suck today. They had sent me a bunch of mock-ups, some of them very cool, very compelling. Some of them were inappropriate. The novel takes place in Tucson, Arizona and one of their mock-ups featured a photo of a strange mammal that only lives in the deserts of Australia or Africa or somewhere that isn’t Arizona. I told them which mock-ups I liked and why, but they ultimately chose a bland and way-too-literal photograph of a curvy-road-ahead highway sign in the desert. I’m not sure why this happened, but I have a theory. First off, my editor left Miramax Books before the novel was released, just before the cover was chosen. She had been much more than an editor—she was my publicist and friend, and she had made sure that my opinions were considered in the creation of my covers. And I trusted her. When she moved on, my main contact became my publicist, who rarely returned calls or emails and ended up quitting Miramax Books in the middle of my book tour. I imagine he just lost the mock-ups and didn’t bother to tell anyone until it was too late, and a clueless 19-year-old NYU intern chose my cover on her first day in the chaotic offices. And now I’m left with this crappy cover for my fourth—and I believe my best—book. Cry me a river.

I certainly wouldn’t pick up Modern Ranch Living in the bookstore. The bland cover screams bland novel. Actually, it doesn’t scream anything. It mumbles. I have bought books based on their covers alone, and about 85 percent of the time, I’ve found that an interesting and compelling cover means an interesting and compelling read. Take the hardback edition of Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way, for instance. The Knopf book features a stark photograph of three packets of Chinese food sauces. I remember seeing this book in Prairie Lights in Iowa City, picking it up because of its cover, and shelling out the twenty-one dollars for it—which was a lot of money for a graduate student in 1996. I had no idea who Gary Lutz was. There were no blurbs on the book, just this intriguing and weird and stark cover, which was designed by Archie Ferguson. Lutz’s stories were as intriguing and weird and stark as the cover. Genius.

Bloomsbury publishes my books in the UK, and while I’ve had no real input in cover selection, those people across the Atlantic really know how to churn out great design. They’ve come up with eight covers for my four books, none of which I’ve objected to, and all of which I’ve liked.

I offered cover ideas to people at Simon and Schuster for The Worst Years of Your Life, an anthology I edited, and I’m grateful they went in another direction. The cover they chose features a diagram of a frog dissection that looks as if it were made on a '70s ditto machine. Created by Catherine Casalino, the cover went on to win design awards. While I approved the cover and approved the covers from Bloomsbury, it took me a while to believe that sometimes book-jacket designers, people who actually get paid to design book jackets, people who actually have a lot of experience designing book jackets, often know better than I. Because of my sour experience with Modern Ranch Living, I’m a little touchy, but I have come to let the experts do their jobs.

Just above, I mentioned that I bought Stories in the Worst Way, a book with no blurbs, but I do think blurbs are important. I read blurbs in bookstores. A blurb from an author I admire might seduce me into buying the book. A blurb from an author whose work I dislike can make me leave the book on the shelf. A blurb from an author I actually know and dislike on a personal level—usually based on their abhorrent behavior in graduate school—means I will turn the book backward on the shelf in the bookstore or hide it under a stack of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue.

Asking for blurbs is humiliating and horrible. If your editor and or publicist can do it for you, you’re lucky. If left on your own, ask writer friends or professors. Because I know how awkward it is to ask for blurbs, this is what I usually say when I’m asked to blurb someone’s book: “I’d be happy to blurb your book, but are you sure you don’t want to ask someone with a fan base that isn’t limited to his mother’s book club?” If you ask someone for a blurb, and they write you a decent one, use it! I once was asked to write a blurb for a friend so I diligently reread his novel—I had read earlier drafts. He didn’t use my blurb, which was a good blurb, damn it! I would have understood if my blurb had been knocked off the jacket by blurbs from Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie and Annie Proulx, but no; my blurb was knocked off by blurbs from writers just as obscure as I am. Feelings check: hurt.

Choosing a cover and gathering blurbs for your first book should be a fun and exciting time, but chances are someone along the way will let you down. Because publishing your first book usually takes quite a while and a lot of hard work, it’s easy to think that you don’t have control over anything that happens. You do. You just have to ask, and maybe be a little pushier than you’re comfortable being.

Mark Jude Poirier is the author of four books of fiction and several screenplays. You can order the UK versions of his books that have much better covers than the American versions here.




Tom Scocca
I assume covers are very important. This might just be a superstition or a way of hedging—sure, there must be some cause-and-effect relationship between some feature of the book and whether or not people buy it, right? But I'm a primitive reader and I judge books by their covers all the time.

My relationship with the cover of my own book is unusual and might be unprecedented. I have not heard from any authors who have had a similar experience. Here is what happened: the publisher sent me a mock-up of the cover for Beijing Welcomes You, and it was perfect. I mean, it was exactly appropriate for the book I had written. No, more than that: if I'm remembering the timeline right, the cover design unmistakably echoed the structure of the book's epilogue—which I had not even turned in yet. The editor tells me it was done by Riverhead's Helen Yentus and Alex Merto. I had no input whatsoever, and I could not be happier with the result.

I have no idea whether blurbs influence readers or not. My publisher believes they are part of the process, and I choose to believe what my publisher tells me. Thinking about blurbs activates the part of my monkey brain that's wired up for seeing the shadow of an eagle while crossing open ground: EXPOSURE TO DEATH-RISK! FLEE! I have been led to understand that this is the normal mindset of writers in blurb season; at least, my publisher was willing to pretend that the minutes-long wincing silences that punctuated our meeting about blurbs were perfectly ordinary behavior.

Even as writers go, I think, I am terrible at asking people for things. Also at networking with other writers. I have gotten two blurbs so far on my own, by which I mean I sort of talked to the only two people I know who are famous writers, and I mentioned that the book was written, and they volunteered to blurb it, at which point I got Riverhead to send each one a galley and a note formally making the awful request. My agent has shaken one or two more loose from somewhere, I gather. And the publisher had worked up a little list of other people to ask. Maybe some of them have now read the galley and liked it, and they'll want to endorse the book, because they want to inspire other people to share the experience. That is how it works, isn't it?

All I really remember from the whole conversation at Riverhead about getting blurbs is an exchange that went something like this:

PUBLISHER: What about [BRAND-NAME BESTSELLING AUTHOR]?

ME: [Wince.]

PUBLISHER: Uh-oh, did you write something about him?

ME: [Nod.]

PUBLISHER: OK, not him.

ME: Maybe he'll be a grown-up about that!

PUBLISHER: He won't.

I probably failed to think of a half dozen people who would have been willing and able to write a blurb. If my own mother were Oprah Winfrey, I'd have skipped her and been like, "Well, who says she'd necessarily like this book?" Here's how dysfunctional my relationship with self-promotion is: when I was in college, my roommate and I started a magazine. Someone at some point was like, "You guys"—I don't even think it was that direct, more like "These guys"—"These guys are just doing this to put it on their résumés." And so two years later, when I was writing my résumé, I left the magazine off, just because, screw you.

So, anyway, if you are reading this, and you like my writing, and you are a published author, I would be honored and delighted if you would blurb my book, and the only reason I didn't ask you was that I didn't want to be annoying. Seriously, there is still time. Tscocca at gmail dot com. I'll send you a galley.

(I had to get up and walk around before I could bring myself to write that paragraph.)

I've never offered anyone else a blurb, because right now, my blurbs would be worthless. That's not neurotic modesty; it's how the currency works. Until your own book has been published, you don't exist.

Tom Scocca writes the "Scocca on Slate" blog. His first book, Beijing Welcomes You is due out in August.





Matthew Gallaway
I remember feeling a little sick when my agent told me in no uncertain terms that the cover is “the most important part” of a book, and I felt even sicker when he ended our discussion about blurbs by declaring that the process was “war.”

As for my cover, I was asked for absolutely no input, but as it turned out, I genuinely loved what my editor sent to me. The only changes that were subsequently made—after consulting with my agent—was to change the font. Although I never would have thought of it myself, I think it was an excellent idea, and helped to make the cover more “readable.” (You can judge for yourself.) I was equally excited recently to get the paperback version, which also arrived without any input from yours truly. Short version: I consider myself very lucky in terms of covers.

As for blurbs, I think it’s a horrible, ugly word, and I try not to use it in polite conversation, even going so far as to substitute the pompous “endorsement.” (Much the way I feel about using “gig” in the context of indie rock, which yeah, no.) Try saying “blurb” a few times without feeling humiliated and embarrassed: there, you see what I mean? Unfortunately, I think blurbs are important, less from a consumer-perspective than in terms of building “buzz” within a publisher, specifically helping to get the marketing and sales “on board.” That said, getting the blurbs almost gave me a nervous breakdown, because I didn’t know any “real writers.” For the first time, I felt sorry not to have an MFA (and the connections to potential blurbers it seems to bring) and even less logically about getting a C+ in my creative-writing class in my sophomore year of college, as a result of watching literally 99 percent of the network coverage of the 1988 Winter Olympics, which wouldn’t have been so bad except I somehow managed not to “get rid of” my television until May, at which point I was pretty much a zombie, academically speaking. I also regretted writing some nasty blog reviews about books written by prominent nonheterosexual novelists ___ and ___, which leads to my one piece of advice to unpublished authors on this subject: don’t waste time tearing down books you hate; focus on what you love, because it’s actually pretty difficult to scrub old blog posts from the Internet, as I learned the hard way lol. The last thing the world needs is another asshole critic, and if the time comes when you’re asking around for blurbs, trust me, you’ll regret being that asshole.

I did send out hand-written requests to perhaps 10,000-15,000 of my favorite authors, including a few gay ones, one of whom was kind enough to write back saying that he “never” blurbs books, even those written by nonheterosexual debut novelists, a “solidarity card” I had been very naively hoping to play. (Note: just because gay writers have generally been ignored and abused and suffocated for the past century doesn’t mean that if you’re a gay writer you’ll be welcomed with a trumpet fanfare and red carpet through the gilded gates of the “literary community,” gay or otherwise; if anything you’ll be viewed MORE harshly by gay writers for reasons that probably are more deserving of sympathy than scorn, although as mentioned above I regret to say I’ve not always been able to resist the latter impulse, although I like to think I’m much better than I used to be.) As it turned out, the blurbs I received came either by way of connections to my agent or editor, or—for the two I procured myself—fellow denizens of the blogosphere. I will say that there was no connection I did not attempt to exploit, no matter how remote, and I still feel a bit “whored-out” from the whole experience. (Which is no reason not to do it; just brace yourself, is what I’m saying.) Happily, in every case the “endorsements” came from writers whose work I greatly admired and had written kind things about on my blog (see note above regarding not being an a-hole.)

Matthew Gallaway is the author of The Metropolis Case. He would like to thank Maud Newton, Ed Sien, and Mark Longaker for their help in curating this edition of Publishing School. He promises to “blurb the shit” out of anyone who asks nicely.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/six-writers-tell-all-about-covers-and-blurbs/feed 32 A Year Ago Today: Underparenting The Sweary Child http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/a-year-ago-today-underparenting-the-sweary-child http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/a-year-ago-today-underparenting-the-sweary-child#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:30:40 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/a-year-ago-today-underparenting-the-sweary-child "My parents raised me with rules and standards, which I gradually learned to break over time. I can remember my mother remonstrating with me, probably in the middle-school years, for my overreliance on 'holy crap.' It was no doubt a relief to my father when I devolved into full foul-mouthed teenagerhood and he could go back to saying "dog-fucking son of a bitch" during Eagles games or whenever. But he didn't try to speed up the process."

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]]> "My parents raised me with rules and standards, which I gradually learned to break over time. I can remember my mother remonstrating with me, probably in the middle-school years, for my overreliance on 'holy crap.' It was no doubt a relief to my father when I devolved into full foul-mouthed teenagerhood and he could go back to saying "dog-fucking son of a bitch" during Eagles games or whenever. But he didn't try to speed up the process."

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/a-year-ago-today-underparenting-the-sweary-child/feed 0 Similarities Between Auschwitz and Downtown Disputed http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/similarities-between-auschwitz-and-downtown-disputed http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/similarities-between-auschwitz-and-downtown-disputed#comments Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:50:48 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/similarities-between-auschwitz-and-downtown-disputed It is astounding that this even needs to be said: "If Charles Krauthammer and Newt Gingrich think there is any comparison between what happened at Auschwitz and what happened at Ground Zero, then they are Holocaust deniers. Build 400 sets of Twin Towers, force an entire population into them at gunpoint, and then crash 800 airplanes into them-airplane after airplane, loaded with women and children, with the goal of exterminating their entire race-and you might begin to have something like Auschwitz.

Lower Manhattan is not Auschwitz."

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]]> It is astounding that this even needs to be said: "If Charles Krauthammer and Newt Gingrich think there is any comparison between what happened at Auschwitz and what happened at Ground Zero, then they are Holocaust deniers. Build 400 sets of Twin Towers, force an entire population into them at gunpoint, and then crash 800 airplanes into them-airplane after airplane, loaded with women and children, with the goal of exterminating their entire race-and you might begin to have something like Auschwitz.

Lower Manhattan is not Auschwitz."

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/similarities-between-auschwitz-and-downtown-disputed/feed 33 Slate Starts A New Blog: "Scocca" http://www.theawl.com/2010/05/slate-starts-a-new-blog-scocca http://www.theawl.com/2010/05/slate-starts-a-new-blog-scocca#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 19:27:23 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2010/05/slate-starts-a-new-blog-scocca Oh, guess what exists? TOM SCOCCA, THE SLATE BLOG. Come for the logo of the hobbyhorse, stay for the way his child makes fun of Mickey Kaus! Surely there will be recipes too.

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]]> Oh, guess what exists? TOM SCOCCA, THE SLATE BLOG. Come for the logo of the hobbyhorse, stay for the way his child makes fun of Mickey Kaus! Surely there will be recipes too.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/05/slate-starts-a-new-blog-scocca/feed 16 Mouthfeel: "Everybody's Nuts" Fraud Nuts Are Disgusting, Fraudulent http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/mouthfeel-everybodys-nuts-fraud-nuts-are-disgusting-fraudulent http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/mouthfeel-everybodys-nuts-fraud-nuts-are-disgusting-fraudulent#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 12:30:05 +0000 Tom Scocca http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/mouthfeel-everybodys-nuts-fraud-nuts-are-disgusting-fraudulent EVERYBODY'S NUTSThese Everybody's Nuts brand pistachios were on sale at the Giant, right by the regular pistachios, and I was feeling cheap and in a hurry so I bought them. They are terrible.

I should have known not to buy pistachios that come in flavors. Pistachios should taste like pistachios and salt. But so I tried to get the most normal-sounding flavors I could: one bag of "European roast" and one of "salt & pepper." Pepper's pretty inoffensive, right?

Does your pepper grinder contain "Yeast Extract"? Because the Everybody's Nuts pistachio company's pepper grinder does! Also "Sugar, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Dextrose, Lemon Juice Concentrate," and "Natural Flavor." Also known as GENERIC SNACK-FOOD GARBAGE DUST.

Meanwhile the "European roast" contains "Modified Food Starch, Natural Flavor, Malt Vinegar, Spice," and "Apple Cider Vinegar." Is that really how they eat pistachios in Europe? With a mist of SOUR GARBAGE baked onto them?

Everybody's Nuts brand pistachios are atrocious. The point seems to be that Americans are now so trained to eat industrial commodity-food mouth objects instead of food, even actual tasty foodstuffs need to be made to taste like FlaVorChem. Also, the Everybody's Nuts packaging contains lots and lots of wacky text about how every single pistachio nut in the package is always wide open, always. I barely touched the Salt & Pepper bag, yet there was a tightly closed pistachio, right in the first handful. So they are disgusting and they are liars. Nice work. Apparently if I go to the Web site and report the unopened nut, I can get a "FREE bag." Can I make that a bag of unadulterated pistachios, from some other company? Thanks.

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]]> EVERYBODY'S NUTSThese Everybody's Nuts brand pistachios were on sale at the Giant, right by the regular pistachios, and I was feeling cheap and in a hurry so I bought them. They are terrible.

I should have known not to buy pistachios that come in flavors. Pistachios should taste like pistachios and salt. But so I tried to get the most normal-sounding flavors I could: one bag of "European roast" and one of "salt & pepper." Pepper's pretty inoffensive, right?

Does your pepper grinder contain "Yeast Extract"? Because the Everybody's Nuts pistachio company's pepper grinder does! Also "Sugar, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Dextrose, Lemon Juice Concentrate," and "Natural Flavor." Also known as GENERIC SNACK-FOOD GARBAGE DUST.

Meanwhile the "European roast" contains "Modified Food Starch, Natural Flavor, Malt Vinegar, Spice," and "Apple Cider Vinegar." Is that really how they eat pistachios in Europe? With a mist of SOUR GARBAGE baked onto them?

Everybody's Nuts brand pistachios are atrocious. The point seems to be that Americans are now so trained to eat industrial commodity-food mouth objects instead of food, even actual tasty foodstuffs need to be made to taste like FlaVorChem. Also, the Everybody's Nuts packaging contains lots and lots of wacky text about how every single pistachio nut in the package is always wide open, always. I barely touched the Salt & Pepper bag, yet there was a tightly closed pistachio, right in the first handful. So they are disgusting and they are liars. Nice work. Apparently if I go to the Web site and report the unopened nut, I can get a "FREE bag." Can I make that a bag of unadulterated pistachios, from some other company? Thanks.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/mouthfeel-everybodys-nuts-fraud-nuts-are-disgusting-fraudulent/feed 56 James Frey's Introduction to "Reality Matters" http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-shadow-editors-james-freys-introduction-to-reality-matters http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-shadow-editors-james-freys-introduction-to-reality-matters#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:40:26 +0000 Tom Scocca http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-shadow-editors-james-freys-introduction-to-reality-matters IT IS REALChoire Sicha: I have just received in the mail the galley of an anthology, released today, about reality television, which is called "Reality Matters" and which has a foreword by James Frey.

Tom Scocca: You have never.

Choire: I have so! (And Will Leitch and others are reading from it tonight in New York!)

Tom: What have you learned from it? What does James Frey have to say about reality television?

Choire: ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE ME OPEN THIS?

Tom: Well, I can't open it!

Choire: I have reservations with discussing James Frey at all, due to discussions about him getting extremely distorted and misunderstood. But, since this book is here...

Choire: His introduction is actually pretty lively and funny?

Choire: And then he writes:

Choire:

I learned the great secret of reality television, and of writing, and of every other form of narrative self-documentation and narrative storytelling: that it's all fake, every second of it, every minute of it, every page of it, every episode of it. It's all fucking fake. Manipulated and embellished and edited. Fake so that it can be real. Structured and polished. Fake so that we can consume it and connect to it and identify with it and enjoy it. Made to entertain. We call it the real world, but it's not. It's all fucking fake.

Choire: He goes on a bit.

Choire: "And to me, at least, it doesn't matter. I don't care. Actually quite the opposite. I revel in reality's fakeness."

Choire: This bit is prefaced by his realization that when he started writing about his life, he realized "it wasn't enough to just document it or portray it in some objective way."

Tom: So now we are all living in James Frey's world.

Choire: Well, he is, I guess?

Choire: I'm not.

Choire: I sort of don't begrudge him this viewpoint?

Choire: It seems rational even? And he's welcome to this belief!

Choire: And to this practice.

Choire: It's not for me. And I don't think he should universalize it, but that's fine.

Tom: It is a bit of a funny stance for a fellow to arrive at after tattooing "FTBSITTTD" on his arm, though.

Tom: I guess he can just enclose the D and make it an B? "Feel the Bull-Shit, It's Time to Throw Bullshit"?

Choire: I can see why all sorts of people give up on reality.

Choire: The influence of fake reality IS pervasive, and if the stuff in this anthology gets to that, great.

Choire: And actually maybe Frey is the right person to introduce this!

Tom: Sometimes stunt-casting works.

Choire: Sometimes you're actually the expert in a field.

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]]> IT IS REALChoire Sicha: I have just received in the mail the galley of an anthology, released today, about reality television, which is called "Reality Matters" and which has a foreword by James Frey.

Tom Scocca: You have never.

Choire: I have so! (And Will Leitch and others are reading from it tonight in New York!)

Tom: What have you learned from it? What does James Frey have to say about reality television?

Choire: ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE ME OPEN THIS?

Tom: Well, I can't open it!

Choire: I have reservations with discussing James Frey at all, due to discussions about him getting extremely distorted and misunderstood. But, since this book is here...

Choire: His introduction is actually pretty lively and funny?

Choire: And then he writes:

Choire:

I learned the great secret of reality television, and of writing, and of every other form of narrative self-documentation and narrative storytelling: that it's all fake, every second of it, every minute of it, every page of it, every episode of it. It's all fucking fake. Manipulated and embellished and edited. Fake so that it can be real. Structured and polished. Fake so that we can consume it and connect to it and identify with it and enjoy it. Made to entertain. We call it the real world, but it's not. It's all fucking fake.

Choire: He goes on a bit.

Choire: "And to me, at least, it doesn't matter. I don't care. Actually quite the opposite. I revel in reality's fakeness."

Choire: This bit is prefaced by his realization that when he started writing about his life, he realized "it wasn't enough to just document it or portray it in some objective way."

Tom: So now we are all living in James Frey's world.

Choire: Well, he is, I guess?

Choire: I'm not.

Choire: I sort of don't begrudge him this viewpoint?

Choire: It seems rational even? And he's welcome to this belief!

Choire: And to this practice.

Choire: It's not for me. And I don't think he should universalize it, but that's fine.

Tom: It is a bit of a funny stance for a fellow to arrive at after tattooing "FTBSITTTD" on his arm, though.

Tom: I guess he can just enclose the D and make it an B? "Feel the Bull-Shit, It's Time to Throw Bullshit"?

Choire: I can see why all sorts of people give up on reality.

Choire: The influence of fake reality IS pervasive, and if the stuff in this anthology gets to that, great.

Choire: And actually maybe Frey is the right person to introduce this!

Tom: Sometimes stunt-casting works.

Choire: Sometimes you're actually the expert in a field.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-shadow-editors-james-freys-introduction-to-reality-matters/feed 17 Pulitzers, Babies and WaPo Headlines http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-shadow-editors-awlcast-todays-top-stories-pulitzers-babies-and-wapo-headlines http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-shadow-editors-awlcast-todays-top-stories-pulitzers-babies-and-wapo-headlines#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:28:32 +0000 Tom Scocca http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-shadow-editors-awlcast-todays-top-stories-pulitzers-babies-and-wapo-headlines S'CAST!Tom Scocca: "It once did not matter if editors had all of their facts straight at the morning news meeting; there was plenty of time for reporting and editing. But with the world looking over their shoulders, things are different. Editors are dressing better, speaking in complete, sound-bite sentences, and mistakes are embarrassing."

Choire Sicha: Uh oh.

Tom: I'll let you go ahead and watch the TimesCast program for me.

Choire: Oh no. You're not getting off that easy.

Tom: My browser is cloggy. Too many tabs! I am therefore Old Media.

Choire: Honestly? I can never get it to play in my browser.

Tom: Do they have an editors' meeting now to prepare for the editors' meeting?

Choire: I can't imagine they'd have time to do that. Okay, I am actually watching the April 9th edition? And it's very strange! Kind of cute? But they say like "And the top story of the day is..." And they show a story... published on the Times website? And then, you're like... So that's this morning's news! Then there's some traditional story-pitching to the team–jockeying for A1 space, I guess, etc.–that you are familiar with. Then there's some jazz! Then there is some really fakey fake chat between editors in the newsroom itself? That part is absurdly faux.

Tom: It does say they have the power to say "Cut!" and have a do-over.

Choire: Yes. You know what, I dislike this. But I would like it if it was like raw feed from the A1 meeting?

Tom: Sure you would, but it would be stupid and irresponsible for them to do that.

Choire: HIGHLY.

Tom: Editorial meetings are not meant to be seen. This is the same mistake Newsweek made when it published its inane and offensive internal e-mail chain about when to use or not use the term "terrorism."

Choire: I like the ideas behind these things?

Tom: What about the idea do you like?

Choire: So once upon a time those institutions were in the business of making a thing. Now they make a couple of things? Or at least a thing and then a thing highly related to the thing? And I view TimesCast etc. as both an extension of at least one of those things but also a way to understand the underpinnings of those things? I mean, you know I am a fan of the sausage getting made. But this isn't the casings and the guts. This is just a PR initiative.

Tom: Look, I'm a big admirer of The Muppet Show.

Choire: Well who isn't!

Tom: The structural genius of the Muppet Show was that the Muppets were performers putting on a theatrical production, so they were creating a frame within a frame–one more level of distance between the viewer and the guy crouching out of view with his hand in a felt bag.

Tom: The Muppets let you go "backstage."

Tom: They presented "backstage" narratives explaining what went on between the curtains.

Tom: They even had Statler and Waldorf up there in their box, disparaging the show–at the Times, they would be the Public Editors.

Choire: I'm sure plenty of people in the Times would agree (not in a nice way though)!

Tom: So when they put Bill Keller in the TimesCast, is he Frank Oz, or is he Fozzie Bear?

Choire: In my limited sampling, he has not been much of a character? But I assume he has a hand in someone's ass. (Or his head, or wherever a Muppet gets it?) Huh. Do you know what the top news story of the day is?

Tom: According to their meeting?

Choire: Yes.

Tom: Nukes? Someone playing golf?

Choire: Historic Nuclear Summit in Washington! Dow Breaks 11000! "Obviously the big news of the morning is the nuclear summit in Washington" is what AME Jim Roberts said at today's meeting. 1. Is it? 2. I think they mean "news event"? Or something like "pre-news"? 3. If it is, it's not at all on the front page of NYTimes.com except in the box that says "Today's TimesCast." Maybe it was earlier news but it turned out not to be news later and/or yet? THEN there is the fake back and forth again, in the news room, between Roberts and Marcus Mabry, a senior editor. Then there's something about recycling in Denmark? And bootlegging in Pakistan?

Tom: That all sounds very responsible and worthy of the Newspaper of Record.

Choire: It... does. It's also dull and vague as newsprint run through dish water.

Tom: I'm checking to see what's Most Viewed:

# The Queen of Talk Declined to Speak
# Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again
# Georgia on My Mind
# Leaders Gather for Nuclear Talks as New Threat Is Seen
# Worlds Without Women

Choire: Hmm! Well that's not an un-match! Wait. I NEED TO HAVE A SIDEBAR.

Tom: " . . . "

Tom: I hope it's called "Sprezzatura."

Choire: I...

Choire: You know what, I'll just not have an opinion for once.

Tom: Me too. Anyway.The puppets. I don't want the New York Times to let me into its editorial meetings.

Choire: Well they're sort of NOT? Except they are enough to get in "trouble" with the "public editor."

Tom: I'm saying: I don't want them to do it for real, and I'd just as soon they stopped pretending to do it.

Tom: Can you imagine if we'd had a Webcam in Peter Kaplan's office? Instead of merely the presumption it was all going to end up in somebody's roman a clef?

Choire: Well, I mean, it'd be amazing! I'd like one at the Times too! I love the idea of the future where we can just look into anyone's office. But. It's not good for anyone or anything particularly? And I cannot imagine this isn't a huge time-suck. And I believe, WITH NO EVIDENCE, that this is happening because of the "image" "problem" at the Times. I can see the PR department saying that "If we personalize the paper, people won't 'hate' us." Which isn't wrong and also is wrong.

Tom: OK, well, let's consider another ombudsperson's column from the weekend.

Breitbart's $100,000 challenge may be publicity-seeking theater. But it's part of widespread conservative claims that mainstream media, including The Post, swallowed a huge fabrication. The incidents are weeks old, but it's worth assigning Post reporters to find the truth.

Choire: Oh my. Oh, I thought that meant the New York Post. And I was like, "that's weird." Wait! It's Pulitzer announcement hour!

Tom: Wait, Gene Weingarten won again?

Choire: He won in 08. And now.... has won... for THE STORY WE DO NOT MENTION.

Tom: Babies in cars?

Choire: SHHH. That's two to the Times, this year, by the way.

Tom: It seems the Post won a lot.

Choire: Also nothing to the NY Post, the NY Daily News and the National Enquirer.

Tom: Now that the Washington Post is the best newspaper in America, can I vent about their atrocious headlines?

Choire: Sure!

Tom: So the kid looks at the front of the sports page today and reads "Another jacket up his sleeve." You know how people are always yelling at the paper about HOW DO I EXPLAIN TO MY CHILD?

Tom: Well, how DO I explain that headline to my child?

Choire: "Another Jacket Up His Sleeve"? Huh?

Tom: I said, "OK, that's a picture of a man who won a golf game. And the prize for winning that golf game is a jacket."

Choire: Oh. Yeah, I needed that explainer too!

Tom: "And then when people say 'Up his sleeve,' they mean... well, they mean something is hidden, like there was some sort of trick or surprise prepared...which doesn't really have anything do to with winning a golf game, so..."

Tom: Please, publish a picture of two men kissing!

Tom: That is very easy to explain.

Choire: Ha! You're a minority parent on that one.

Tom: "They love each other." The end.

Choire: Oh. Hmm.

Tom: But how do I explain to my child, now that he is reading things, that sometimes adults don't care enough about stringing the words together in a way that makes sense?

Choire: I think that's a very morally damaging lesson to teach your child.

Tom: I don't want him exposed to that kind of perversion and depravity.

Tom: "Up his sleeve."

Choire:
That's just rude... I think. Or IS IT? I have no idea!

Tom: I'm going to have to start hiding the newspaper from him.

Choire: Can I say this about headlines as well?

WRAP ALERT: Subject: EXCLUSIVE: Washington Post Wins 4 Pulitzer Prizes

Tom: That is an alert from The Wrap?

Choire: Yes!

Tom: EXCLUSIVE. You know, I think I'm OK with them giving the prizes to what's left of Old Media still, then.

Choire: Hmm! Are all these things related? Like if the staff of the Times is so busy putting on makeup for this fake TV show, are they (or people just like them!) too busy to write good headlines for the Washington Post?

Tom: Maybe. And the staff of the Post is too busy getting mau-maued by Andrew Breitbart? Over the question of whether or not the people who were screaming "faggot" were also screaming "nigger."

Choire: Oh boy.

Tom: And whether anyone intentionally spat on a congressperson, or whether they just screamed in the person's face with such force and lack of self-control that they sprayed spittle.

Choire: Well! I bet Kathleen Parker could get us some answers.

Choire: You know. The one with the Pulitzer?

Tom: Yeah, I didn't even know what to say about that. She's one of the better op-ed columnists at the Post, but it's hard to express how minor an accomplishment that is. That just means she's not obviously an imbecile, a partisan hack, and/or a liar.

Choire: Well that does deserve some kind of badge and/or prize.

Tom: Like getting off the Post op-ed page?

Choire: Now that's a prize.

Choire: Ugh. I did it.

Choire: I fell into rereading the Weingarten story.

Tom: Happy afternoon! So are we going to put some of this up on the Web, to illuminate our internal process?

Choire: Only when I'm done weeping about the babies. And only if I can call it...

Choire: AWLCAST!

Tom: DONE AND DONE.

---

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]]> S'CAST!Tom Scocca: "It once did not matter if editors had all of their facts straight at the morning news meeting; there was plenty of time for reporting and editing. But with the world looking over their shoulders, things are different. Editors are dressing better, speaking in complete, sound-bite sentences, and mistakes are embarrassing."

Choire Sicha: Uh oh.

Tom: I'll let you go ahead and watch the TimesCast program for me.

Choire: Oh no. You're not getting off that easy.

Tom: My browser is cloggy. Too many tabs! I am therefore Old Media.

Choire: Honestly? I can never get it to play in my browser.

Tom: Do they have an editors' meeting now to prepare for the editors' meeting?

Choire: I can't imagine they'd have time to do that. Okay, I am actually watching the April 9th edition? And it's very strange! Kind of cute? But they say like "And the top story of the day is..." And they show a story... published on the Times website? And then, you're like... So that's this morning's news! Then there's some traditional story-pitching to the team–jockeying for A1 space, I guess, etc.–that you are familiar with. Then there's some jazz! Then there is some really fakey fake chat between editors in the newsroom itself? That part is absurdly faux.

Tom: It does say they have the power to say "Cut!" and have a do-over.

Choire: Yes. You know what, I dislike this. But I would like it if it was like raw feed from the A1 meeting?

Tom: Sure you would, but it would be stupid and irresponsible for them to do that.

Choire: HIGHLY.

Tom: Editorial meetings are not meant to be seen. This is the same mistake Newsweek made when it published its inane and offensive internal e-mail chain about when to use or not use the term "terrorism."

Choire: I like the ideas behind these things?

Tom: What about the idea do you like?

Choire: So once upon a time those institutions were in the business of making a thing. Now they make a couple of things? Or at least a thing and then a thing highly related to the thing? And I view TimesCast etc. as both an extension of at least one of those things but also a way to understand the underpinnings of those things? I mean, you know I am a fan of the sausage getting made. But this isn't the casings and the guts. This is just a PR initiative.

Tom: Look, I'm a big admirer of The Muppet Show.

Choire: Well who isn't!

Tom: The structural genius of the Muppet Show was that the Muppets were performers putting on a theatrical production, so they were creating a frame within a frame–one more level of distance between the viewer and the guy crouching out of view with his hand in a felt bag.

Tom: The Muppets let you go "backstage."

Tom: They presented "backstage" narratives explaining what went on between the curtains.

Tom: They even had Statler and Waldorf up there in their box, disparaging the show–at the Times, they would be the Public Editors.

Choire: I'm sure plenty of people in the Times would agree (not in a nice way though)!

Tom: So when they put Bill Keller in the TimesCast, is he Frank Oz, or is he Fozzie Bear?

Choire: In my limited sampling, he has not been much of a character? But I assume he has a hand in someone's ass. (Or his head, or wherever a Muppet gets it?) Huh. Do you know what the top news story of the day is?

Tom: According to their meeting?

Choire: Yes.

Tom: Nukes? Someone playing golf?

Choire: Historic Nuclear Summit in Washington! Dow Breaks 11000! "Obviously the big news of the morning is the nuclear summit in Washington" is what AME Jim Roberts said at today's meeting. 1. Is it? 2. I think they mean "news event"? Or something like "pre-news"? 3. If it is, it's not at all on the front page of NYTimes.com except in the box that says "Today's TimesCast." Maybe it was earlier news but it turned out not to be news later and/or yet? THEN there is the fake back and forth again, in the news room, between Roberts and Marcus Mabry, a senior editor. Then there's something about recycling in Denmark? And bootlegging in Pakistan?

Tom: That all sounds very responsible and worthy of the Newspaper of Record.

Choire: It... does. It's also dull and vague as newsprint run through dish water.

Tom: I'm checking to see what's Most Viewed:

# The Queen of Talk Declined to Speak
# Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again
# Georgia on My Mind
# Leaders Gather for Nuclear Talks as New Threat Is Seen
# Worlds Without Women

Choire: Hmm! Well that's not an un-match! Wait. I NEED TO HAVE A SIDEBAR.

Tom: " . . . "

Tom: I hope it's called "Sprezzatura."

Choire: I...

Choire: You know what, I'll just not have an opinion for once.

Tom: Me too. Anyway.The puppets. I don't want the New York Times to let me into its editorial meetings.

Choire: Well they're sort of NOT? Except they are enough to get in "trouble" with the "public editor."

Tom: I'm saying: I don't want them to do it for real, and I'd just as soon they stopped pretending to do it.

Tom: Can you imagine if we'd had a Webcam in Peter Kaplan's office? Instead of merely the presumption it was all going to end up in somebody's roman a clef?

Choire: Well, I mean, it'd be amazing! I'd like one at the Times too! I love the idea of the future where we can just look into anyone's office. But. It's not good for anyone or anything particularly? And I cannot imagine this isn't a huge time-suck. And I believe, WITH NO EVIDENCE, that this is happening because of the "image" "problem" at the Times. I can see the PR department saying that "If we personalize the paper, people won't 'hate' us." Which isn't wrong and also is wrong.

Tom: OK, well, let's consider another ombudsperson's column from the weekend.

Breitbart's $100,000 challenge may be publicity-seeking theater. But it's part of widespread conservative claims that mainstream media, including The Post, swallowed a huge fabrication. The incidents are weeks old, but it's worth assigning Post reporters to find the truth.

Choire: Oh my. Oh, I thought that meant the New York Post. And I was like, "that's weird." Wait! It's Pulitzer announcement hour!

Tom: Wait, Gene Weingarten won again?

Choire: He won in 08. And now.... has won... for THE STORY WE DO NOT MENTION.

Tom: Babies in cars?

Choire: SHHH. That's two to the Times, this year, by the way.

Tom: It seems the Post won a lot.

Choire: Also nothing to the NY Post, the NY Daily News and the National Enquirer.

Tom: Now that the Washington Post is the best newspaper in America, can I vent about their atrocious headlines?

Choire: Sure!

Tom: So the kid looks at the front of the sports page today and reads "Another jacket up his sleeve." You know how people are always yelling at the paper about HOW DO I EXPLAIN TO MY CHILD?

Tom: Well, how DO I explain that headline to my child?

Choire: "Another Jacket Up His Sleeve"? Huh?

Tom: I said, "OK, that's a picture of a man who won a golf game. And the prize for winning that golf game is a jacket."

Choire: Oh. Yeah, I needed that explainer too!

Tom: "And then when people say 'Up his sleeve,' they mean... well, they mean something is hidden, like there was some sort of trick or surprise prepared...which doesn't really have anything do to with winning a golf game, so..."

Tom: Please, publish a picture of two men kissing!

Tom: That is very easy to explain.

Choire: Ha! You're a minority parent on that one.

Tom: "They love each other." The end.

Choire: Oh. Hmm.

Tom: But how do I explain to my child, now that he is reading things, that sometimes adults don't care enough about stringing the words together in a way that makes sense?

Choire: I think that's a very morally damaging lesson to teach your child.

Tom: I don't want him exposed to that kind of perversion and depravity.

Tom: "Up his sleeve."

Choire:
That's just rude... I think. Or IS IT? I have no idea!

Tom: I'm going to have to start hiding the newspaper from him.

Choire: Can I say this about headlines as well?

WRAP ALERT: Subject: EXCLUSIVE: Washington Post Wins 4 Pulitzer Prizes

Tom: That is an alert from The Wrap?

Choire: Yes!

Tom: EXCLUSIVE. You know, I think I'm OK with them giving the prizes to what's left of Old Media still, then.

Choire: Hmm! Are all these things related? Like if the staff of the Times is so busy putting on makeup for this fake TV show, are they (or people just like them!) too busy to write good headlines for the Washington Post?

Tom: Maybe. And the staff of the Post is too busy getting mau-maued by Andrew Breitbart? Over the question of whether or not the people who were screaming "faggot" were also screaming "nigger."

Choire: Oh boy.

Tom: And whether anyone intentionally spat on a congressperson, or whether they just screamed in the person's face with such force and lack of self-control that they sprayed spittle.

Choire: Well! I bet Kathleen Parker could get us some answers.

Choire: You know. The one with the Pulitzer?

Tom: Yeah, I didn't even know what to say about that. She's one of the better op-ed columnists at the Post, but it's hard to express how minor an accomplishment that is. That just means she's not obviously an imbecile, a partisan hack, and/or a liar.

Choire: Well that does deserve some kind of badge and/or prize.

Tom: Like getting off the Post op-ed page?

Choire: Now that's a prize.

Choire: Ugh. I did it.

Choire: I fell into rereading the Weingarten story.

Tom: Happy afternoon! So are we going to put some of this up on the Web, to illuminate our internal process?

Choire: Only when I'm done weeping about the babies. And only if I can call it...

Choire: AWLCAST!

Tom: DONE AND DONE.

---

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9 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/the-shadow-editors-awlcast-todays-top-stories-pulitzers-babies-and-wapo-headlines/feed 9 Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Paid Me http://www.theawl.com/2010/03/the-shadow-editors-last-night-i-dreamt-that-somebody-paid-me http://www.theawl.com/2010/03/the-shadow-editors-last-night-i-dreamt-that-somebody-paid-me#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:30:58 +0000 Tom Scocca http://www.theawl.com/2010/03/the-shadow-editors-last-night-i-dreamt-that-somebody-paid-me THISTom Scocca: Now I am going to tell you about my dream.

Choire: Oh neat!

Tom: I was working in some sort of coffeehouse at one end of a table. One one side, to the left, was Alex Balk. On the other side, to the right, was some tiny hipster girl blogging for Gawker.

Tom: In the middle of the afternoon, someone came around to the girl with a scorecard and a menu, showing her how many Blogging Points she had accumulated that day and what candy she could buy off the rewards menu. She still also had to pay some money for the candy, besides cashing in her Denton points for it.

Tom: And they made sure this transaction was really obvious and protracted, because they were trying to antagonize Balk by letting him watch it.

Tom: So I flipped out and went into a raging jeremiad.

Tom: Like, "YOU THINK IT'S OK FOR YOU TO WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; YOU THINK IT'S FUNNY, YOU WORKING FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; YOU THINK IT'S FUNNY THAT IT BUGS THAT GUY THAT YOU WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; BUT IF YOU ARE FUCKING WORKING FOR FUCKING SKITTLES, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS GOING TO HAVE TO WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES! EVERYONE! IN THE WORLD! SKITTLES!"

Tom: I swear to you that is what I did dream.

Choire: Sad to say, I can believe it.

Tom: I did not know that my subconscious even knew who Alex Balk WAS.

---

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]]> THISTom Scocca: Now I am going to tell you about my dream.

Choire: Oh neat!

Tom: I was working in some sort of coffeehouse at one end of a table. One one side, to the left, was Alex Balk. On the other side, to the right, was some tiny hipster girl blogging for Gawker.

Tom: In the middle of the afternoon, someone came around to the girl with a scorecard and a menu, showing her how many Blogging Points she had accumulated that day and what candy she could buy off the rewards menu. She still also had to pay some money for the candy, besides cashing in her Denton points for it.

Tom: And they made sure this transaction was really obvious and protracted, because they were trying to antagonize Balk by letting him watch it.

Tom: So I flipped out and went into a raging jeremiad.

Tom: Like, "YOU THINK IT'S OK FOR YOU TO WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; YOU THINK IT'S FUNNY, YOU WORKING FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; YOU THINK IT'S FUNNY THAT IT BUGS THAT GUY THAT YOU WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES; BUT IF YOU ARE FUCKING WORKING FOR FUCKING SKITTLES, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS GOING TO HAVE TO WORK FOR FUCKING SKITTLES! EVERYONE! IN THE WORLD! SKITTLES!"

Tom: I swear to you that is what I did dream.

Choire: Sad to say, I can believe it.

Tom: I did not know that my subconscious even knew who Alex Balk WAS.

---

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/03/the-shadow-editors-last-night-i-dreamt-that-somebody-paid-me/feed 30