2009 November | Three Guys One Book

50 Things Publishers Shouldn't Do

We’ve had so much fun with the 50 Things Writers Shouldn’t Do post (currently up to roughly a gazillion things writer’s shouldn’t do), that we decided to turn the tables, and solicit your help in creating a list of things publishers shouldn’t do.

JE:

Don’t try to capture lightening in a bottle—just promote your authors instead.
Don’t publish “the next” anything.
Don’t look for “the sure thing.”
Don’t overpay debut authors—nine times out of ten, you’re ruining at least one career.
Don’t publish debuts in HC—TPO is the way to go!
Don’t pretend that Bookscan is in any way prescriptive in negotiating author advances.
Don’t send royalty statements six weeks late.
Don’t publish so damn many titles!
Don’t put a dog on the cover of a book as a means of
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Jane Smiley Interview from Author Magazine

JE: As I’ve mentioned before (see interviews with Chris Cleave and Andre Dubus Jr.), friend of the blog and creator of Author Magazine, Bill Kenower, shoots an excellent series of author interviews at Third Place Books in Seattle. Bill’s a novelist himself, and I think he does a great job getting other writers to open up on camera, which is a real talent. I should point out that not only is Bill providing us all with great content, but he’s building himself a hell of a platform, and an amazing network. Think of the potential blurbers he’ll be able to approach when his next book is ready. Every young writer needs to be paving these inroads if he/she wants to grow a successful career–trust me, it’s cold out there. And the best

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Things We Didn't See Coming IV - Steven Amsterdam

You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to pull one over on the characters in the story Cake Walk, the fourth short story in Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam. This book is coming to book stores in February of 2009, but if you’ve been following things around here, I’ve been giving a little taste of the each story. It’s important to look at the collection as a whole and each of the individual stories as chiseled pieces of stone, each their own work of art. So far we’ve been out in the wilderness of Australia, I’m guessing here, somewhere outside a huge city that has up to this point been folding in on itself. Now we now there has been

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JE and JC Tag-Team Dan Chaon

Drawing by Austin Kleon

Dan Chaon is enjoying more success than ever with his new novel, “Await Your Reply” (see our coverage here), and we at Three Guys couldn’t be happier about it, because, well, the dude deserves it. Great book, great guy. And for those of you who don’t know how to pronounce his name, it’s pronounced /Shawn./ Last week, JC and I threw some questions at Mr. Chaon, who was so gracious as to field them. The results, the first batch, anyway, are after the jump. Look for a second round with Dan Chaon soon. In the meantime, go out and read Await Your Reply.

JE: Okay, so this is something I’ve

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Alone by Yiyun Li

Alone In our Three Guys post, “50 Things A Writer Shouldn’t Do“, I talked about the folly of isolating your lead character.

So here comes Yiyun Li, in the November 16th issue of the New Yorker. In a great example of Chinese/American cultural fusion called Alone, she isolates her lead character.

Suchen is dining solo in an outdoor restaurant in the scenic American west. There is surrounding table talk of forest fires miles away. There is no immediate danger to the edge of the resort town where they are seated. But mentioning the fires caught my attention, kept me on guard for more developments and created a sense of unease. Meanwhile the writer started to

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Things We Didn't See Coming III, Steven Amsterdam

The hard times continue in this ever-evolving and riveting collection from Steven Amsterdam. I will say that my all time favorite novel about the end of the world, The Road, echoes in the story Dry Land just a little bit, but when you send a man out into the rain, to clear people out from their property, it brings back those terrifying memories. Our hero is navigating an incredible deluge, the remote countryside is brimming with puddles and terrified wildlife. I think Amsterdam is making the point in reverse about urban sprawl, and where the animals go when today’s society build on everything possible. In this case we witness stampedes, and nature turns

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Where Have All The Guys Gone?

JE: One thing we hear at Three Guys a lot (usually from women) is how refreshing it is that we offer four very diverse (but all very “guy-ish”) perspectives on the literary and publishing landscapes. We deal mostly in the currency of literary fiction, which is a market overwhelmingly dominated by middle-aged, college educated women. Why is this? Why is it most of my dude friends stopped reading fiction in college? In the past year-and-a-half, I’ve made over thirty (you count ‘em, thirty!) personal appearances at book groups for “All About Lulu.” On average these groups are attended by anywhere from eight to twenty-five women, and they’re almost invariably gracious. But I’ve yet to see a single guy–once or twice, a

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The Nervous Breakdown

JE: We’ve mentioned Brad Listi’s The Nervous Breakdown a number of times here on the blog, and JR and I have been posting stuff at said kick-ass online-turned-real-life writers collective for a long while. TNB is a perfect place for debut and established writers to build their readerships, and maintain their profile. The array of writers who gather at TNB is dizzying, and every one of them has the same golden opportunity to sort out their demand the old-fashioned way: by writing great stuff, and interfacing with readers. Today, TNB rolls out 3.0, and it’s well worth

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Things We Didn't See Coming, II - Steve Amsterdam

Let me tell you more about this book: this narrative comes at you slowly but it’s sneaky, like a garden in spring, one day you wake up and it’s all around you. In the first story What We Know Now, our narrator went with his parents to the other side of the world, or so it seemed, ultimately it was just a place in the country. To be honest I knew something special was going on with the book when Amsterdam had his hard-as-nails father profess that the neighbors were going to die if he went to the city the next day. This is the end of the world, but it’s not, certainly, as the people we’ve

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Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

JC: When we first started 3G1B, it was a way for us to talk about books together over long distances. Now, of course, three has become four, and while our conversations have turned towards the vagaries of writing and publishing, our en masse book reviews have been replaced by other features that aren’t as difficult to orchestrate as four broad readers reading the same book at the same time, and the accompanying tome-like posts. Fortunately, JE and I coincided recently on Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply and had the chance to discuss it.

JE: Dan Chaon knows when to quit writing and tell a story. And man, can the dude spin a yarn.

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Things We Didn't See Coming - Steven Amsterdam

It’s the end of the world 1999, Prince said that, or was it REM, before they sold out and Bill Berry walked away? I’m stunned at the amount of collections that make their way out into the world, especially interconnected collections. Every agent and editor worth their salt has told me that collections don’t sell. Funny, I see a half dozen from every major publisher three times a year, so something ain’t right. Sure, collections are always followed by a novel, and when the writer was signed on, he or she handed in that novel too, but what writer working today doesn’t have at least two or three novels in a drawer?

Australian writers

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Stephen King apes Raymond Carver, like we need that.

Stephen King’s hardcover adaptation of the Simpson’s movie arrives; I mean lands in stores all over the country this week. He’s also got a story in the New Yorker, arriving in your laps this week. Ray and Mary are driving along, going out for smokes, on the way to Wal-Mart, and King is trying hard to be Raymond Carver, he even sits in the car like Carver used to, or Richard Ford for that matter, (see Rock Springs, the first story in the collection) and tells the reader exactly what’s on the minds of his characters, and then has them speak it aloud. Its minimalist, this King story, and Mary and Ray are all surface.

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50 Things a Writer Shouldn't Do

DH: A list recently published in The New York Times by a noted restaurateur gave 100 rules for what service staff should not do. I thought a list of 50 things that writers shouldn’t do would give us all a chance to vent. I’m contributing 10 items. Some of these pet peeves have pissed me off for years:

Don’t use italics for more than one line.
Don’t tell me what someone looks like if it doesn’t matter.
Don’t make me draw a diagram to figure out who’s speaking.
Don’t write in a manner that’s different from your everyday speech. You should write like your best talk when you’re having a very good day.
Don’t start your story with a character alone in a room unless you’re
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Tomorrow is National Bookstore Day

We spend a lot of time around here trying to develop schemes and strategies to save the book biz. The best way I can think of to keep the book industry healthy in the short-term, anyway, is to go out and fork out some cash at your local indie bookstore. Tomorrow is National Bookstore Day. Yes, I know e-books are the wave of the future, but we all love brick and mortar! Spend some cash, people! Here are just a few recommendations from each of the four Three Guys, just in case you’re at a loss on what to read next:

JE:

Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply: JC and I will

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Some Things That Meant The World to Me

Two Dollar Radio is fast becoming one of my favorite indie presses. I love their brand, I’m digging their editorial voice (they recently picked up Rudolph Wurlitzer’s backlist), and I love love love that TDR is a family joint. I sort of see them as the new Soft Skull. But different.

Joshua Mohr’s debut, “Some Things That Meant the World to Me,” is a gritty debut worth getting excited about. You may have seen the coverage of this in Poets & Writers this spring—and BTW, thanks P&W for always including an indie when you do your seasonal coverage! STTMTWTM (okay, this is not a book which lends itself well to acronyms) is

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