Authors interview Authors:
This month, Dmitri Keramitas talks with Paul Schmidtberger about writing, electronic media and fear in publishing.
Paul Schmidtberger is the author of Design Flaws of the Human Condition, an urban comedy of adultry published by Random House in 2007, an "assuredly entertaining romp" whose characters are handled "with a sympathetic grace" (Publishers Weekly). He has lived in Paris for twelve years. Schmidtberger was a practicing lawyer specialized in intellectual property and international arbitration, but now writes full time. He has written articles for numerous US publications, including the New York Times, and is working on a new novel. Dmitri Keramitas was educated at the University of Hartford, Sorbonne, and the University of London, and holds degrees in literature and law. He lives in Paris, teaching English and law in the French university system. His short fiction has been published in numerous literary journals. DK : I’d like to speak about the role of the new media in books, both writing and publishing them. PS: Well, I’m about the most un-high tech person imaginable. I don’t like technology, and technology doesn’t like me. I have a web site. Given how inept I am with anything hi-tech, it's a small miracle, but the site is up and running smoothly. What place does electronic media have in marketing books? All publishers now strongly encourage their writers to put up a site. My site just has some information about myself, the novel, a few snippets from the novel. Also photos. It’s pretty basic. But when I recently wrote an article for the New York Times, there was a link to my site, and I can tell you my stats jumped considerably. You don't put the first chapter in your site? No, I don’t. Actually Amazon does that, and I don’t really appreciate it. It’s more or less appropriating a work without the author’s permission. Google is another example of that. Did you or your publisher pay for your site? I did. With very few exceptions, the publisher won’t pay for it. Much of the marketing burden these days has been outsourced from the publisher to the writer. A friend whose memoir was published by a university press had to go to a private firm to have the editing done. That’s more and more frequent. Is it just more convenient, or a question of economics? So many publishers are now part of corporations, which are in turn part of multinational groups. I don’t think this makes for a good mix. My first novel was published by Broadway, an imprint of Random House. It used to be an independent publisher. Random House itself is now part of Bertelsmann. When there was a corporate restructuring, Broadway disappeared. I lost my entire imprint, and worse, my editor left at about the same time. It’s all about cutting costs … What do you think of the recent case involving the William Styron estate? The family demanded all e-book rights to Styron’s work. Though the courts didn’t make a final decision, Random House gave in. The publishers weren’t very happy. A very prominent editor at Random House wrote a long defense of the house, saying that they should have been compensated for the work they put in developing William Styron. In the case of Random and Styron, yes. Apparently they did put in a lot of time and effort shaping his work. But nowadays, publishers don’t necessarily nurture writers the way they might have in the past. These days, the writer is often left to fend for himself. Are you bothered by the idea of people reading your novels in the form of an e-book? Not in the least. I don’t read e-books. But I have friends I respect who swear by them. They certainly save space. Yes, some of my friends went on holiday with a machine containing a dozen books, while I found myself with one single, very long, boring book. There are predictions of e-books that will become network phenomena, filled with links, and video interludes, etc. That is definitely going to happen. The problem is that a novel is a work of art—it’s my work of art—and I wouldn’t want my work being made part of things I don’t approve of. This isn’t anything new. The Mona Lisa is part of a huge number of other things, both good and trashy. It’s bad enough getting spam about Viagra, I don’t want a link from my novel to a Viagra ad! Of course, if your novel deals in Viagra in some way, a link could lead to a definition, and on-line forum … If you were offered an ad from Viagra or some other product for a link in your novel, would you accept or refuse? My first instinct is to say I’d refuse—I’d like to think so. But actually, I don’t know. It really depends on the context. Of course, product placement is already widespread in the movies. IT technology can erase the brand of whisky Bogart is drinking and insert a contemporary one sponsoring the film. I wouldn’t be surprised. It can also create problems. The editor of my last novel suggested that I delete a reference to United Airlines in a joke a character tells. They were afraid of lawsuits? As a lawyer I can tell you I was within legal bounds, but they just wanted to avoid courting trouble, which makes a lot of sense. What do you think of audio-books? They’re great. My father used to drive fifty miles to work. He loved borrowing them from the library and listening to them. I have a friend who listens to audio-book novels while doing housework, ironing … Personally I wouldn’t be able to concentrate enough on what I was listening to! Have you considered adapting the form of your fiction to the new media? You mean like including e-mails and text messages? I prefer that kind of thing when other writers do it. Some writers can be very funny that way. Having spent a significant part of my adult life in a law firm, I love books that skewer corporate culture with fake emails, memos, power-point presentations etc. And the recent trend towards blog novels? I find they’re better as blogs than as novels. Though I did find one blog, written by a woman in Texas, to be hilarious, and wrote to tell her she should write fiction. But it seems the blog and the novel are two different things. The novel is about getting the reader into a story, while most blogs are about exhibitionism and voyeurism. Is social networking becoming important? Are you in Facebook? Yes, I’m in Facebook. Not LinkedIn or Twitter. I go onto it about once a day, or every couple of days, and write a little note from Paris. The publishers say that a Facebook presence is important for marketing. You have to make it personal, which results in a loss of some privacy. Actually, I prefer writing which is kind of anonymous. The emphasis on personality can put too much stress on a person’s looks, for example. If you’re a good-looking writer, you can be sure the entire back cover will be a photo. That can ultimately lead to the idea that certain types of people have the right to write about certain things, and I just don’t believe that. You’ve been writing articles recently. Has the use of e-mails, file-sharing, etc. made the pace of the business of writing faster? A lot of my contacts with publications are by e-mail, but many still require queries by the post. So I can’t say my pace has been especially quickened. I do most of my book-shopping on Amazon. Everything is available there. Do you consider that an advantage for the author? For me, nothing can replace an old-fashioned bookstore. The customer can see the books, leaf through them, smell them. The writer can speak to customers, and to the book-dealers. Amazon also makes possible the selling of used and remainder books. The re-selling market has become gigantic. I’m currently reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a very fat novel that was delivered in pristine condition, and it cost me 18 cents. Eighteen cents? If it were a book I’d written, I’d rather the owner just lend it to another reader for free rather than see it sold for eighteen cents. It does make it possible for more people to read your books. If writers don’t make money from their books, they’re simply going to stop writing them. In the same way that if musicians don’t get paid for their music they won’t make music. Print-on-demand technology has made alternative types of publication more feasible. There’s the Year in the Merde phenomenon. That was self-published and became a huge best-seller—in England in particular. The “Englishman in France ” is a British niche genre, going back to A Year in Provençe. Right. The self-publishing model can work in a few special cases. I’m not judging it at all. But I think the majority of books risk getting lost in the shuffle. They’ll just be published in name only. Do you think the way the new media has affected the capacities of younger people is impacting writing and publishing? Well, publishers definitely want short books. Two hundred pages … three hundred gets to be long. There’s the idea that readers have shorter attention spans. Yet my own children like long fantasy novels, and series … Twilight, and the Harry Potter books. Of course, JK Rawling was rejected by an awful lot of publishers! What do you think of the kind of people who work in publishing? I think they’re incredibly intelligent, sophisticated, well-read people. They’re more intelligent than the average person who works in most businesses. Of course, the same was true of the people who worked in the financial sector. What’s the main problem in publishing then? They’re afraid, in some respects. Their jobs are always on the line, so every book has to be profitable, if not a blockbuster. Or else they want something already proven successful … teenaged vampires or some such. They say they want the “fresh” and “new” but then they ask for teenaged vampires. What’s fresh and new about teenaged vampires? They’re behind the curve, instead of ahead of it? Behind the curve, yes, definitely. I wish there were a way to tell the people in publishing to trust their own judgment. To forget about corporate oversight and go with their gut feelings. But that's a hard thing to ask someone to do when they've got to pay their rent, just like anybody else. Especially when corporate parent companies are looking to cut costs. To order Design Flaws of the Human Condition.