Month: March 2014

When a heart attack left Avery Chenoweth wondering how much time he had left, the author decided to self-publish for the first time.

A Charlottesville resident since 1990, Chenoweth had already published Albemarle: A Story of Landscape and American Identity, Empires in the Forest: Jamestown and the Making of America, and the short story collection Wingtips, so he was confident in the strength of his work and his ability to get an agent in the future.

“But I had a sense of immediacy, that this has got to be done now,” he said.

Radical Doubt, a suspense novel about two college kids lost in the criminal underworld of a summer resort, launched in hardcover and for Kindle on Amazon in the summer of 2013. Full of Chenoweth’s trademark dark humor, the book garnered effusive praise from readers (“primarily from strangers,” he mused).

When he began shopping the novel around, though, Chenoweth was shocked to discover that, “New York publishers will not look at Kindles without something like 5,000 unit sales in the pitch meeting.” Radical Doubt retails for $11.42 in paperback ($2.99 for Kindle) and has sold just shy of 2,000 copies so far.

Chenoweth understands the realities of the new publishing industry, but that doesn’t mean he likes them.

“[Publishers] admitted for years that they can’t reach buyers, and now they’ve put that burden on others. They think in terms of bestsellers, not publishing,” he said. “They only want the top 10 percent, stuff about tighter abs, tighter ass, reductio ad absurdum. If you’re not famous they won’t publish you. Now William Faulkner can go fuck himself. I’m not comparing myself to him, but he wasn’t a celebrity.”

A graduate of UVA’s prestigious creative writing program, Chenoweth saw how books that sell well online have set new standards for would-be authors.

“All the genres are getting shorter and tighter and brighter,” he said.

He also believes the accelerating effect of the Internet on readers has changed their expectations of stories.

“If there’s too much attention paid to the finesse of the work, people get bored,” he said. “If someone isn’t dead in the first paragraph, no one cares.”

The rise of e-publishing has been hailed as a democratic revolution, an even chance at greatness for writers who haven’t yet “made it” with traditional publishers. It’s especially appealing in a town like Charlottesville, where you can’t throw a rock without hitting a writer, a bookstore, or a book festival attendee (not in mid-March, anyway). But as Chenoweth discovered, the holy grail of a publishing contract is more difficult to reach than ever—unless a writer is prepared to be a marketer, too.

It’s a puzzle local business consultant Bethany Carlson considers daily. She helps writers produce and distribute their work, “which means doing market research and coming up with a business plan, including a budget,” she said. “We use Kickstarter to raise the funds to produce the work professionally. For books, this means pro editing, cover design, sales and marketing, and distribution.” Given the size of this area’s book-minded community, Carlson believes the city “is in a great position to become a center of independent publishing.”

Chenoweth’s still not sold on the idea that writers should have to be salespeople, too.

“The author’s job is just to write the book, but that seems irrelevant now,” Chenoweth said. He noticed an Amazon newsletter promoting his book when Doubt netted 20 reviews, but support seems to have tapered off. Though an Amazon representative denied it when he called, Chenoweth claims that an industry insider told him the retail giant expects 40 reviews before a book gets promotion. He’s attempted to reach the mark through local giveaways and Amazon advertising, but an ad that attracted “340,000 eyeballs got just a few click-throughs,” he said.

Though Charlottesville has many venues for author promotions, it may lack the volume and diversity of readers to propel local writers to the national level just by word of mouth.

Virginia Festival of the Book Program Director Nancy Damon has noticed that local author events get “a little bit of a bump” over non-local ones, but only if authors have brand-new books and haven’t already done many in-town events. As few as four or five author appearances can effectively glut the market appetite.

But that doesn’t mean locals aren’t hungry for personal interaction with the written word, as fabulist fiction writer Leeyanne Moore witnessed when she was an organizer for literary events at the Bridge PAI. She hosted open annual readings where semi-professional writers (“folks with real talent who were not living primarily from writing”) delivered skillful performances to consistently small crowds.

Participation swelled when new writers entered the mix. “These weren’t your typical avant garde intellectual Belmont hipsters,” Moore said. “They didn’t consider themselves writers, just brave people who wanted support. Clearly audiences want to see themselves in these venues.”

Aspiring writers in Charlottesville have ample opportunity to witness possible outcomes of the writing life. Publishing’s watershed changes have revealed new means for success and altered writers’ expectations in the process. Not everyone needs a deal with Viking to be happy.

“Here, you can see up close and personal how it’s working out for everybody,” Moore said.

She contrasted her VBF encounter with a “glowing” Hugh Howey, self-published sci-fi author whose eighth book made the bestseller lists, and a WriterHouse event with Chad Harbach, the UVA MFA superstar whose novel The Art of Fielding earned a massive advance and a No. 1 Notable Book slot in The New York Times and who, according to Moore, “did not have that happy glow.”

The promise of self-publishing fame is a beacon for undiscovered authors, but the reality of the market is that authors who aren’t writing for a specific online niche readership face a rocky path to stardom. Moore believes there is a relationship, if not a direct one, between developing a grassroots following close to home and making the leap to a larger audience.

“Local networking gets you the big time networking,” said Moore, who’s been volunteering with area groups for years. The Amherst MFA described how a seminar at WriterHouse helped her meet a new friend who then referred her to an agent who read her unpublished short story collection and sent her a list of people to pitch it to.

“I got to number six on the list, and he got back to me in four minutes,” she said. “It’s amazing. I don’t know what will happen next, but I never would have looked at those people if a much more commercial agent hadn’t sent me that list and said ‘Why don’t you try it?’”

For many years, The Hook ran a writing contest in conjunction with the Virginia Festival of the Book that was judged by John Grisham. With the newspaper’s closure last summer, it looked like local writers were out of luck if they wanted to compete for cash and readers. But WriterHouse, the local nonprofit dedicated to promoting the art of writing in all of its forms, has stepped up to fill the void.

Celebrity guest judge Jane Alison, the most recent addition to the UVA creative writing faculty,  will select first-, second-, and third-place winners from the top submissions of creative nonfiction works in three categories: general, local flavor, and youth. Entries open today and close on May 15 and each first-place winner will win $500 and publication in a C-VILLE Weekly special issue in July. For more information, visit www.writerhouse.org/contest.

Ready to give it a shot? If you were a student in Alison’s undergraduate fiction writing workshop, you’d be told to close your laptop and put down your pen.

“I believe in writers working as hard as they can to have their brains translate the larger world around them,” Alison said in a recent interview. “So I send them out into town and make them absorb things, not to impose all their predetermined views on things that they see but to be completely photographic and absorb everything.”

Alison established herself as a literary force with her 2009 memoir, The Sisters Antipodes. Applauded by Kirkus Review, Publishers’ Weekly, and People magazine, the book was Alison’s third attempt to make story and sense out of personal history.

“I was born in Australia, and I grew up in the Australian foreign service until my parents switched partners with an American foreign service couple,” she said. “I ended up getting a new father and a new accent and a new nation and a new name. So I think the things I write have to do with these core issues of identity, expressed particularly in place.”

Alison came to her craft by circuitous way of studying “Latin and Greek in a crappy high school in Washington D.C.,” she said. “But not so crappy that they didn’t have Latin.” She majored in classics at Princeton and went on to Brown, where she “had a fit,” as she put it, and resolved to become an illustrator.

Alison left academia to illustrate children’s books and began writing for newspapers, first in D.C., then Miami. In New Orleans she worked as a speech writer for Tulane University.

“I found myself writing what felt fictional because someone else would be speaking, not me,” she said.

Focusing on adult fiction, she went back to school and received her MFA from Columbia. She married and moved to Germany, where she wrote The Love-Artist, a novel about Ovid and why he was banished from Rome.

“I had an awareness of being someone who was not in the right place and didn’t speak the language and lost all kinds of identity as a result,” she said.

Two more novels followed, as did her memoir, a book of translations, and a teaching job at the University of Miami. She moved to Charlottesville to work at UVA in the summer of 2013.

You could share your own story with Alison if you participate in WriterHouse’s contest. Though she said her advice may not be better than anyone else’s, she cares a lot that writing be “ultimately genuine and necessary and language based.”

You can hear Alison at the Virginia Festival of the Book, where she will read from her latest work, a book of translations called Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation in Ovid. “It’s nothing to do with non-fiction,” she said, “but lots to do with language and translating anything into anything else, which is what we do as writers always.”

WriterHouse Writing Contest 2014 Guidelines at a glance:

Genre: Creative non-fiction (true stories with a narrative, told in a literary style)

Categories: General, Local Flavor, Youth (open to writers 18 years or younger at date of submission)

Length: 1,500 words or less

Entry fee: $10

Deadline: Midnight, May 15, 2014

Specifications: Entries should be submitted electronically at writerhouse.org/contest. Documents should be typed in 12 point, Times New Roman font, double-spaced and paginated. Include your story title in the header. Do not put your name on the document. Attachments should be in Word or PDF. Previously published work will not be considered.

Additional guidelines: One entry per person. No erotica or self-help. Not open to staff or the family of staff at C-VILLE Weekly or board members or family of board members at WriterHouse. Three prize winners will be judged by Jane Alison in each of the three categories above, and  first place recipients will be awarded $500 apiece . Winning stories will be published in a July edition of C-VILLE Weekly, and authors will be invited to read at a celebratory event.

The Virginia Festival of the Book began in a world with no Kindles, no iPads, and no online self-publishing. Barnes & Noble recently had arrived in Charlottesville and the death knell for independent bookstores promptly sounded. It was 1994, and a company called Amazon had just started selling books over the Internet.

Two decades later, independent bookstores are still hanging on and Barnes & Noble could be the next endangered species trampled by the Amazon juggernaut. Meanwhile, the Virginia Festival of the Book is gearing up for its 20th literary orgy.

The festival’s history spans some of the most dramatic changes in publishing and book selling since Gutenberg came up with the printing press. Rob Vaughan, president of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the guy who came up with the idea for a local book festival, is taking nothing for granted, but he’s been pleasantly surprised by the persistence of his preferred form of consuming literature.

“I’m impressed the book is still the predominant form of publication and the predominant form of reading,” he said.

Vaughan said the idea for the book festival was inspired by an event poet Gregory Orr put on in the early ’80s to honor Stanley Kunitz, which drew six or seven poets and around 150 people. The success of the event spurred Vaughan to envision a modest book fest with maybe 15 programs.

“We ended up with 55,” he said.

Today the festival offers more than 200 programs during its five-day March 19-23 author-filled extravaganza, and the more than 20,000 attendees aren’t just book-loving locals. People come from more than 30 states, and Vaughan said he’s been amazed at the number of guests from places like Ohio or Michigan who approach him and say, “I’ve taken vacation for the past 10 years to come to the book festival.”

While not as prolific as film festivals, other book festivals have sprung up—and disappeared—during the Virginia Festival of the Book’s 20-year history. Vaughan said he never doubted the viability of the festival.

“It’s been a high priority of ours,” he said. “People have responded in lean years. We’ve gotten sponsors.” With a handful of ticketed events and a budget of $260,000, the festival is “almost self-sustaining,” he added.

“This is really a community that supports books,” said festival program director Nancy Damon. “We still have bookstores. A lot of towns don’t have book-and-mortar stores anymore.”

Damon, who’s organizing her 14th and final book fest, described how the changes in the publishing industry have changed marketing priorities.

“Publishers have shifted from putting money behind debut authors to the people they feel comfortable will sell a lot of books,” she said. “Now books have trailers.”

Back in the festival’s infancy, publishers didn’t want authors to go to book festivals because they’d be one of many, said Damon.

“Now they want them to go because a guaranteed audience will be there, it’s on our website, and you’re going to get publicity from a book festival.”

Before e-books, self-publishing was called vanity press, and some of the pitfalls that made those books unlikely to be read still exist. “There are lots of books that are not very good,” observed Damon, “and that could have used an editor and a copy editor.”

That doesn’t mean a strictly e-book author won’t get into the festival. “We try to rate them on their merits,” said Damon.

But there’s one location they will not have a program: in a bookstore.

As Damon prepares her final festival, she’s not quite ready to dish about the most pain-in the-derriere authors, the ones she tactfully dubs “high maintenance.”

However, she did share her worst experience as program director when an author double booked and she didn’t find out until three weeks before the festival that he would be a no-show. Eric Abrahamson, who wrote A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, was scheduled for the business breakfast and several hundred tickets had already been sold. Fortunately veteran newsman Roger Mudd was in town and agreed to speak at the breakfast.

“It was briefly a nightmare,” she shuddered.

Other festival mishaps were more prosaic, like when authors’ books failed to show up at events.

“We’ve had book mix-ups,” said Damon. “We had two mystery writers named Anne, and the kid at B. Dalton delivered the wrong Anne’s books to the program. One of them called and yelled at me.”

Damon, of course, would rather focus on the festival’s high points. Her personal favorites include last year’s joint appearance of Black Power icon John Carlos and civil rights trailblazer Congressman John Lewis. For the 10th festival, she scored the killer line-up of Michael Chabon, Michael Ondaatje, and Garrison Keillor.

“That was a pretty exciting year,” Damon said.

The traditionally sold-out festival luncheon has hosted dynamic speakers like Alexander McCall Smith and Doug Marlette, who died shortly after he was in Charlottesville in 2007. Damon was especially fond of One Life to Live writer Michael Malone, who made it to the festival despite the “check engine” light that appeared in his Jaguar.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a luncheon speaker who was a dud,” she said.

Damon and Vaughan both credit well-known local authors like John Grisham and Jan Karon, and poets Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove for lending their support to the festival. Rita Mae Brown, who was the first luncheon speaker in 1994, is back to introduce this year’s speaker, David Baldacci.

“I think the book festival continues to draw a wide range of authors and audiences of all interests—unless it’s bondage books,” said Damon. In other words, don’t look for a 50 Shades of Grey panel, although you will find Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid.

With topics ranging from fishing to fiction, from crime to cooking, publishing to poetry, and romance to the Middle East, the Virginia Festival of the Book truly offers something for everyone. Damon said she’s always been most proud of “the diversity of the topics, the diversity of the audience embracing literacy in all its forms.”

Vaughan said Damon brought continuity to the festival during her 14 years as program director.

“She knows what works and what doesn’t work,” he said. “She’s also one of the most avid readers I’ve ever encountered.”

To her as-yet-unnamed successor, Damon had some advice: It’s important to get along with all sorts of people, don’t presume anything, be adept at moving vast amounts of data, and never ever relax.

“When you think everything has come together, it will fall apart,” she warned.

As Damon juggled myriad details in scheduling 218 events with 439 participants for the last time, she reflected on her job.

“It does wear you out,” she admitted. “You go from ‘Oh God, I’m forgetting something,’ to the point, ‘It’s too late now.’”

In the run-up to the festival, Damon decompresses by watching British murder mysteries. Does one in the book biz ever get sick of reading? “Let’s just leave it that I’m watching a lot of British murder mysteries,” she said.