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How to win readers and influence book sales

Guest Post by Sam Cooney October 15

China Miéville stands at the far end of the shipping container in a taut black t-shirt and green cargo pants, looking every bit the weird fiction author/socialist activist/creative writing teacher/universal soldier. Given fifteen minutes free reign to do as he wants in this makeshift lounge room on the bank of the Yarra River, Miéville chooses to conduct a classic surrealist game of exquisite corpse with thirty high-spirited festivalgoers at the Melbourne Writers Festival. We have thick black markers in hand, creating monsters in thirds: heads and torsos and legs yanked from quick rummages through the imagination. Miéville looks like he’s properly enjoying himself. ‘I’ve always been interested in monsters and the fact that humans have forever been a monster-creating species,’ he says. We look up at him from our crouched seating and smile and nod. Right now we’d do just about anything for the fellow. Like fish strung on a line (or some other metaphor that clarifies his influence) he has us dangling and ready for the griddle. If the festival had a people’s choice award, Miéville would win it. It got me thinking of the deliberateness (or not) of his public demeanor, and others who’ve gone before.

Throughout the ten days of last month’s festival I tweeted faster than a monkey on a typewriter (if that monkey was on uppers and living with his mother and trying to write the jazziest road trip novel ever). This rapidly acquired and rather self-entertaining tweeting habit of mine was rather incessant and delightfully reckless. I made public any sentence that pricked my ears, any statement that might prove itself controversial and/or interesting to others. Which, in the end, was everything, as a quote relayed on Twitter leaves no room for context. ‘The problem with the internet is that you say something and no one ever forgets it,’ remarked Miéville during one festival event, and my friend Chris leaned towards me, smirking, and said: ‘He’s talking about people like you, you know.’ But I couldn’t nail Miéville. Of all the authors visiting the festival, he proved the most difficult to trap, trip up or portray as silly. The man is adroit: he speaks carefully but not without zeal, his answers to questions are layered and inclusive, and he’s a bit of a Parseltongue to us slithering along the ground, but a good Parseltongue.

The manipulation of one’s public persona is now a rampant pastime for many, and an entire existence for a few. It’s life: more people are broadcasting themselves than ever before, circulating a profile judged suitable (or not) for widespread consumption. Writers are just one cluster who’ve become further ensnared by the nownownow info-greedy age, although sometimes it’s argued that those who push pens or pound at keyboards are less equipped to deal with this inevitability. I think this is crap. Writers are as diverse a group of people as any; I’m bored of how often they are lashed together in a bundle labeled ‘shy’ or ‘inept’. Some of the brashest and most steady-gazed people I’ve met are writers (not that this can be extrapolated in any valid way). And writers have a couple of things going for them: they can reasonably expect their work to attract attention because writing is a communal game; and the large majority of the public who do actually recognise them usually retain a measure of civility – often an abashed reverence. This is why you won’t see Phillip Roth or Jeffrey Eugenides swarmed in quite the same manner as say Justin Bieber or Angelina Jolie.

Still, being a famous (this word has almost lost any sort of clear meaning) author is not exactly shits and giggles. Some simply can’t hack it, while others deal with it atypically. Think Bret Easton Ellis and his asshole persona. Then there are characters like Tao Lin, who has beaten his own path, a new path. Snubbing the customary literary ascent, Lin’s is the Bear Grylls method: up vine and boulder while drinking his own piss out of a snake skin and eating a yak’s eye. But the kids love it.

And of course there are the big three ‘recluses’: Harper Lee, Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger. Outsiders, eccentrics’, dissidents: pigeonholed in many ways, they are the modern authors most famous for eschewing fame. But it was Pynchon himself who noted that the ‘media-shy recluse’ is an invention of the media. And Brian Joseph Davis in The Globe and Mail wrote that, “To suggest that a refusal to publicize one’s image is an illness akin to agoraphobia is the mark of a paranoid, fractured culture that Pynchon himself has so often brilliantly written about.” Maybe, maybe not. What we do know is that it’s fun to throw designs at someone like Pynchon and see if they stick. It’s not unlike the figuring out that goes on when reading a heavy novel. It’s curiosity, a hunger for ‘facts’, and thus I can’t see a way to argue against it, even if I want to. Let them hide, and let everyone else seek.

Salinger wrote a book called A Catcher in the Rye, a book that grabs people by their mind-testicles and squeezes. It is an intimate novel, a close novel, one of those reads that make you feel like you and the author are chums. This mistaken familiarity is a phenomenon of celebrity culture, now more commonly experienced with TV or film stars. It sometimes materializes when you see a celebrity in ‘real life’ and recognize them before realizing you don’t actually know them. My mom did it the other day – Russell Crowe walked past her in the street and she said, ‘Hi Russell.’ But Salinger did not even give anyone a chance to accost him. He hid away from his readers, refusing to be a consenting party to their reading experience. Adam Hanft suggested in the Barnes & Nobel Review that, ‘In an era where authorial relevance is increasingly measured by Facebook friends and Twitter followers, Salinger’s willful, willed withdrawal reminds us of the reasons we were drawn to him in the first place.’ Again, I think this is drawing quite a long bow; Hanft’s viewpoint takes advantage of its twenty-twenty hindsight. People were drawn to Salinger because he could do something better than the vast majority of the rest of us, not because he was good at staying out of sight.

In a different piece in the Barnes & Nobel Review, Andrew Keen says this of Salinger:

The uncanny thing about today’s real-time media world is that it embraces Salinger’s aesthetic of intimacy, familiarity, and authenticity while being utterly foreign to Salinger’s values in its immediacy and accessibility. That’s the true Salinger Effect. Thus, the most popular writers on real-time Twitter are imitations of Holden Caulfield cuteness — Stephen Fry, for example, or Neil Gaiman — writers with hundreds of thousands of followers who have developed authentically intimate voices.

… That’s the great irony of today’s real-time media revolution. Salinger’s fanorexia, his relentless obsession with privacy and anonymity, is rooted in the same aesthetic as Stephen Fry’s desire to lick his followers. Both want to be true — one through uncompromising opacity, the other through equally unqualified transparency.

Apart from the complete misuse of the term ‘fanorexia’ (it normally means a fan who is so fixated on a celebrity that he/she copies that celebrity’s eating disorder; and if Keen was trying to recoin the term ‘fanorexia’ to signify the starving oneself of fans, it just sounds clunky) Keen hits on something he calls ‘truth’ or ‘authenticity’, characteristics people often want to bestow upon the people they like. Calling someone authentic is just a very general way of saying, ‘I think you’re tops’, but I can see what Keen is getting at. It’s the no bullshit vibe, the gut reaction that someone is trying to fuck you around, or if they are, it’s for your own good.

But I’m straying off topic. Back to Miéville, and why he is such a goddamn conqueror on the promotional trail. In short, it seems you need two elements to be a literary Thor: content (good books) as your foundation, and an inimitable public style (whether it be snarly recluse or Hollywood asshole or, in Miéville’s case, muscle-covered earring-loving gentleman of erudition and wit). Be a firework and you’ll be noticed, but if your public manner rings true to your audience for a longer period of time, even if you are being completely false, then you can milk those book-buying suckers.

Just be careful though – don’t go thinking your fans are your friends, ‘cause they ain’t. George R.R. Martin found this out recently. Known for happily mixing with fans at conventions and festivals, the delay of the next book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series so riled up some enthusiasts that they repeatedly contacted and scolded him. He reacted by accusing them of bullying, and threatened to not write the next book at all. Whoah.

People are not as respectful as they used to be when it comes to celebrity. Thanks to the internet and a trillion television channels and idiots who are famous for being idiots, and thanks to our individual self-important streaks that are manifested in a collective stampede for fame, we feel we can put our arm around the shoulders of film star x or celebrated novelist y. We want to lift the veil to see what’s underneath. We’re all like that Dr Gunther von Hagens guy, peeling the skin back on each other and ourselves, to know every last little thing. Miéville talked about something similar at the start of his game of exquisite corpse, but this was to do with monsters. Still, it’s apt. He talked about the problem of the ‘Scooby-Doo impasse’: how we are no longer frightened of the monsters we create, as we understand that they are disguises, that they are there to represent something. Knowing stuff is a core drive of the human race, but man, it sure does ruin things.

I wrote recently in a piece for The Rumpus that Miéville is a man of paradoxes. He’s charming, but looks like a Romper Stomper. He’s masculine in temperament but feminine in his movements. He writes speculative fiction, but isn’t a douchebag. However, the contradiction that applies here is that he is at once both completely open and completely mysterious. I reckon he knows exactly what he’s doing, that he’s charismatic and all that, but I also think he isn’t doing it on a wholly conscious level. He’s not dastardly, just likeable, and it works in his favor as a famous author. The lesson? Write mad books, and be yourself, as long as you are totally awesome and memorable.

Cross-posted from samuelcooney.wordpress.com

 

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