One thing that the Apple geeks aren’t mentioning about the Intel chip use is something that I see as pretty important. If you were thinking of bolting from PC to Mac because of the DRM invasiveness, Apple is no longer a sanctuary. This is a bad move in more ways than one.

The headline for this USA Today BEA wrapup from Carol Memmott is “Glitterati outshine literati at BookExpo.” That’s funny. Because I saw plenty of small press booths crowded big-time on Friday and Saturday. I saw an NPR reporter talking with Dennis Loy Johnson. I saw oodles of folks converge upon the Independent Consortium party. The list goes on.

Granted, the main booths at Random House and Time Warner were crowded shitstorms. But then I didn’t come to BEA to touch John Irving’s hem. I came to find out about upcoming releases, meet people I had corresponded with, and get a better sense of how the publishing industry operated.

So far, in the reports that have been proffered, there seems to be two common reactions to BEA floating around:

1. Big popular names occluded the little guys.
2. This was a despicable showcase about the “business” of books, rather than books themselves.

In response to Point (1), I should point out that nobody is holding a gun to your head to see Billy Crystal. Nobody is forcing you to waste your time standing for about an hour in line to get two minutes with Spike Lee. BEA is really an experience that an individual makes of it. Reading Carol Memmott’s article, you would think that literary people were nowhere to be found. But the fact of the matter that it was Memmott, a reporter who purports to “cover books” for a major newspaper, who decided that Billy Crystal’s schtick, Candace Bushnell, and Tab Hunter were more important (and I’m giving Memmott a generous margin here) than getting a goofball report (as I did) about Anne Rice’s latest novel or (more nobly) finding out about the interesting novels in translation that Farrar Strauss & Giroux were profiling.

There was no shortage of interesting books at BEA to write about. And there were limitless people to talk to.

Memmott’s article then is not really about books at all, but about a journalist “reporting” who was at the autograph table — information readily available at the BEA main site — and an opportunity to hobnob with Tab Hunter about his sexuality. What then distinguishes this nonsense from a People Magazine profile?

As to Point (2), I don’t necessarily believe that thinking about the publishing of books detracts from the appreciation of books as works of art, provided that one keeps the lines of thought separate. In fact, I’d say that it’s pretty damn essential for us to be thinking about the business of publishing a little bit, if only so we can understand why certain books get published and others don’t. It is the business, as unsavory as it may be, that determines who are the midlisters, who are the A-listers, and who are left ignobly in the remainders piles.

Why then should we ignore it? If book lovers cut this area of thought from their ruminations, then in my view they are no different than the book publishers who often fail to recognize the book community. Maybe it’s the idealist in me, but I personally believe that if this chasm is bridged in some way, that if both sides make an effort to understand each other’s needs, the book climate can only be improved. Literary lovers get the books they want published and publishers discover the conduits in which to make their literary fiction sell.

Part of the problem is that publishers view the publishing business with a “winner take all’ approach. They dwell upon the Billy Crystals and the Candace Bushnells of our world who need to add rumpus rooms to their palatial Park Avenue estates. Memmott is culpable here, because her article is echoing this hard line. The duty here is for all sides to think and act more flexible about literature and to consider that sometimes a small press title or a book distributed through the streets might just turn a profit in its own right. And the duty for all journalists is to remain unseduced by celebrity bloat and realize that 30,000 people descend every year because it’s about the books, stupid.

The tireless Dan Wickett is blogging over at Scott’s and taking full advantage of his stint to offer his comprehensive coverage.

I’ve arrived back in San Francisco. But with all the information I have to process, I’m not done with BEA by a long shot. To get a head start, I started listening to one of the minidiscs on the flight and transcribed the following notes until my laptop battery ran out. (DFW fans, take note. Major details on Consider the Lobster to follow.)

Please note that because my crap is still packed, I’ll be referring to the publishing houses as “they” and “them.” I did in fact speak with specific people, but I want to ensure that I spell their names right. So without further ado:

Again, I can’t convey how cool the people at Soft Skull Press are. Poor Richard Nash was sounding hoarse when Bud and I talked with him at length during the Independent Consortium party. By the time he got to PGW, the poor man was sans voice. But I did want to point to two nonfiction titles on the catalog that were introduced to me: Michael Standaert’s Skipping Towards Armageddon, a takeoff on Joan Didion’s famous book, is an expose that dishes the dirt on the Left Behind series. Equally noteworthy is a collection entitled America’s Mayor, which is critical of Rudolph Guiliani and examines his legacy before 9/11 (a mayorship that seems all too overlooked these days).

I hooked up with the folks at Tor to see if they had any emerging science fiction authors that they were promoting. What’s interesting is that, aside from the next Wheel of Time volume coming nout on October 11 and The Road to Dune (which will collect several previously unpublished Frank Herbert essays), Tor has shifted to an interesting YA emphasis with a new imprint called Starscape. The field is relatively new for them. And it’s a particularly interesting direction for Tor and for science fiction in general, given that Monkeybrain is also specializing in pure speculative adventure anthologies (inspired by the Chabon-edited anthologies for McSweeney’s). If I had to offer a prediction, I think we’re going to be seeing a good deal of books that pay homage to Heinlein-style juvenile fiction and a return to Golden Age-style speculative fiction in the next year or two. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. On one hand, part of me sees this as a backlash to the prodigious work of China Mieville and John C. Wright. But if both subgenre markets are allowed to flourish, then this is still a good sign that speculative fiction is alive and well.

At St. Martin’s, there’s a hot allegorical title coming in October. And David Maine (who may very well be a smarter Gregory Maguire) has a new retelling of Cain and Abel called The Preservationist. St. Martin’s is also publishing a TPB original novel called Away from You, wirtten by Melanie Finn. The novel tells the tale of a South African woman living in the States who has to go back to her home country and unravel a family mystery.

Not sure how much I got into it with my APE report, but Drawn and Quarterly has a lot of Joe Sacco-style comics journalism titles coming up. War’s End is a followup by Sacco to The Fixer. It’s a collection of two short stories set in Bosnia. [UPDATE: Jessa writes in to let me know that the Sacco pieces have been previously collected and are not, in fact, followups.]

There’s also Baghdad Journal from Steve Mumford. Mumford took three trips to Iraq and drew what he saw there. It’s due out in October. Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang chronicles a French cartoonist who went to North Korea to work for an animation company. He spent three to four months there. The D&Q folks assured me that it had a dark comic tone.

For more traditional titles from D&Q, Seth’s new volume, Wimbledon Dream, is “a complete departure from anything he’s done.” But then that’s the case with nearly anything Seth does. Even so, this volume is in the form of a scrapbook, but, unlike other scrapbooks, it tells a linear narrative. Michael Rabagliati has a follow up to Paul Has a Summer Job called Paul Goes Out, an autobiographical story about getting a first apartment in 1983.

Little Brown has several interesting titles. Rick Moody’s The Diviners is a comic novel set in the movie business about vanity, ambition and the frantic pace of lives. While we’re not all that crazy about Moody, this novel has been declared “ambitious” and has Moody using a broader canvas for his characters. There’s alos a first novel centered around a mother/daughter growing up in Tahiti. (I’ll have the exact name after I unpack.)

Finally, we come to David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster — also set to be published by Little Brown. Here’s what I found out:

• The book comes out in January 2006.
• It includes “about twelve” essays. (The title essay is, of course, the one that appeared in Gourmet.
• The infamous “Host” essay will appear.
• There will be an essay that DFW published under a psuedonym where he attended the Adult Video News Awards, confronted his own shame, and contemplated the desexualizaition of sex.
• One essay’s on Updike, the other’s on Dostoevesky.
• “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” the essay about the 14 year old girl tennis player that DFW knew better than any adult, will be there.
• Apparently, there’s also an essay on language and culture in which DFW uses the publication of the American Usage Guide to talk about what gets put into dictionaries, who lets cerrtain words in, dictionary making, and deconstruction. DFW confronts the decay of language, and how it is enhanced by the publications of these dictionaries. The title page of this essay is in 4 point type and contains hundreds and hundreds of solaces he’s collected over the years.

Also from Little Brown, Walter Mosley has new Easy Rawllins novel coming out. Los Angeles 1967. Easy Rawlins meets hippies. The previous novels were Mosley’s father’s Los Angeles, but this one begins in Mosley’s own Los Angeles (meaning the one that he personally experienced). Apparently, when Mosley was a teenager in 1967, he used to drive to the Sunset Strip and want to be a hippie.

I am now about to collapse. More later.

Also, Mary Reagan (who I was glad to meet) has some great photos up. As does Nathalie.

The mistake I made was to forget about the galleys. I became so wrapped up in talking with many people that I had forgotten the “book” in Book Expo America. While I had a flight to catch in mere hours (I’m at JFK now), there was clearly no other option. Fill as many bags as I could, FedEx them back home, and get the hell out.

The funny thing about this is that if the books had been replaced with, say, a bank vault, this would have the element of despicable crime written all over it. But at BEA, it seems, this behavior is sanctioned, if not outright encouraged. One publicist who had “a big stack of galleys” waiting for me had the sense of humor to unload a colossal 1,400 page book (which I’ll end up reading of course, now that I can’t say no to a longass book).

This probably wouldn’t have happened had Sarah Weinman not been there. Sarah, besides maintaining a great blog, being a supernice person and being wise beyond her years, accompanied me as I talked with many more publicists and was good enough to put up with my fey enthusiasm and brio, which so overwhelmed me that, during some points, it took me more than a minute to introduce the publicist to Sarah (a sin for which I am now stewing in my own personal guilt).

It was Sarah who coined the term “drive-by galleying.” But it was also an effort to meet some of the remaining folks on the floor and get the lowdown on the titles. Curiously, some of them were hesitant about the audio thing. Which begs the question: why be a publicist if you’re afraid of a microphone that’s placed deliberately outside of eye contact so as to not frighten people off?

On Sunday, the floors were gradually dwindling. But people still milled about. There were last minute deals and, at the Farrar Strauss & Giroux table, all the marketing people were huddled around a table eating a bag of Doritos.

But Sarah went above and beyond the call of duty. She offered to FedEx the bags of books back to me. It was Sarah who reminded me that I had a plane to catch. It was Sarah who whittled the bibliophile in me down to brute pragmatism. And for this I remain not only grateful, but indebted. Rest assured the gesture shall be paid in kind. That’s the kind of person she is, and if you haven’t read her blog or met her in person, you’re missing out.

I’m still sitting on an incredible amount of information to process. I have a small time window before my flight. So in lieu of a summary, I’m going to use the time to talk with more people. The rest will have to wait upon my return to San Francisco. (However, if JFK has a wireless connection I can use, I’ll do some posting from there if I have the time.)

* * *

I have the complete scoop on David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster directly from DFW’s editor/head publisher himself. Watch these pages.

* * *

There was also an unexpected meeting between me and somebody else. It wasn’t Tanenhaus, but the results will be here in visual and audio form. Needless to say, you might be surprised.

* * *

Dale Peck, believe it or not, has a children’s book coming out through Bloomsbury.

* * *

Megan and I spoke with Chronicle Book Review Editor Oscar Villalon at the PGW party and he gave me a great idea to improve the state of book review coverage in the nation. The insane scheme will probably be unearthed here and at Bookdwarf.

* * *

Maud Newton is a standout lady. And all the bloggers I met here proved to be fantastic people. If you’re ever in New York, I highly recommend hooking up with these folks.

* * *

Cake?

* * *

Moleskine junkies: They’ve got a new product. It’s a reporter’s notebook, which means that the binding is at the top. Still has the pocket and it’s been proving quite handy. Moleskine was kind enough to get me a copy. Certain Moleskine addicts managed to walk away with considerably more. I’m not naming names.

* * *

Whoever created the ridiculous Subtalk ads on the subway is a genius. They are quite comically alarmist. One, for instance, has a man gripping the outside part of a closed subway door, and hanging on as the subway moves. The ad declares in bold letters: “This man might lose his life!” Either New York has people who regularly do this or some guy did this and there was a major wrongful death suit. Either way, to think that the MTA would spend money on such an ad, for such a minor problem, is a funny thought. Someone clue me in.

* * *

The crowd here is starting to thin out, but there are still people to meet and books to pick up. A full summary of upcoming titles will be coming in the next day or two. We never sleep around here.

The publishing industry is a strange business. For one thing, the product that a publisher sells isn’t necessarily guaranteed a profit. While this could be said of other products bought, sold or bartered for, there is a unique difference in the book world. You see, the profit margin is contingent not on the amount it takes to produce the labor, but on the difference between advance and royalties paid out to author (ideally as low as possible, which is interesting given that it is the author who creates, pitches and slaves over the work in the first place), the printing costs and amount shilled out to staff (also ideally as low as possible) and the net sales that come from a book’s sales through a distribution method that is equally batty (printing a book from a press, shipping all these copies out to warehouses, and then further shipping all of these to various booksellers) and time-consuming (the production process alone takes up to a year and a book might tank after three weeks).

It is strange in the sense that certain formats carry stigmas by buyers and sellers alike. If a book is self-published, it is genuinely considered crud (in most cases, with good reason). If a book bypasses the delectable hardcover stage and is issued anew in paperback, it is either genre or of questionable literary merit. (And often the two go hand in hand, no matter how seasoned the efforts.)

The publishing industry has responded to setbacks in sales by publishing even more books (150,000 last year), which is about as sensible as slaughtering five hogs to make three ham sandwiches. Further, even the sharpest minds in the industry (the publicists with the ideas, the editors who hone a book to fit a market, the MFAs shrewd enough to discern a dunce from a diamond) have no definitive idea about the “future of publishing,” a nebulous catch-all term that could mean everything and nothing. It is this “future of publishing” that catches voices in sussration, that has the eyes roll back into dollar signs shanghaied from a 1940s cartoon, that forms the basis of panels and deals.

Yet nobody can make a clear call.

The good news is that, like roulette, any number can win and any player on the table could make a killing. Never mind the odds or the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing or that the guiding brain behind these two hands (read: executive managers) is often slow to change, innovation, or experiments. Understandably so, because if it takes two years to clear things with the editors, the money men, and the people who distribute the books for purchase and consumption, then one must abide by a clear outline. Lack of planning is, after all, what made the initial attempt to build the Panama Canal such a disaster.

But the nice thing is that anything and everything can be published, provided it is profitable. Skirmishes and disagreements can be set aside because the one thing that everybody can agree upon is money. Dennis Loy Johnson told me that when he met with booksellers, they knew him as the Moby Lives rabble-rouser. But this didn’t prevent him from selling the goods or meeting chain resistance in the brick and mortar stores. And in the Generation Next panel I attended, one editor pointed out that self-publishing shouldn’t be necessarily dismissed, pointing out that a book in the streets managed to sell 200,000 coppies.

Because this is a business, it also means that the literary author who unexpectedly found success with a flagship title can be wooed by a bigger publisher hoping for the steady turnaround, leaving the small guy flinging whatever silent code of commitment into the dust. It also means that the reverse situation is true, where an author who doesn’t sell can also find himself standing in the dole line (not that he isn’t already).

The above is more or less what I’ve put together from the people I’ve talked to at BEA and my own perceptions (pre-show and post-show). A lot of this was discussed in the aforementioned Generation Next panel (which I plan to summarize in a future post). But I’ve come away with a greater appreciation for what publishers do and with the unique dilemma and strange system that they face.

* * *

I attended the Generation Text panel on Friday. The panel, a collection of “hybrid young editors,” included:

• Liz Nagle, Associate Editor, Little Brown & Co.
• Chris Jackson, Editor, Crown Publishers
• Lorin Stein, Editor, Farrar, Strauss & Groux
• Gillian Blake, Executive Editor, Bloomsbury
• Kate Travers, Editor, HarperCollins

The panel was moderated by Steve Zeitchik, News Editor of Publishers Weekly.

SUMMARY:

The room was again SRO. I strongarmed my way to the front to take notes in what little floor space remained at the front of the panel table.

Steve Zeitchik asked if publishing was heading towards a “winner take all approach” and a reading climate where everybody was reading the same book. He wondered if the editors had any specific strategies to promote reading or specific titles.

Gillian Blake responded by saying that any campaign of this sort could start with TV, but expressed concerns that there wasn’t enough space in people’s consciousness for books.

Chris Jackson noted that grassroots politics were instrumental in marketing The Lies of George W. Bush. The book did well because of its ability to tap into Working Assets and similar conduits. He said he wasn’t completely pessimistic.

Lorin Stein, who struck me as a dour and humorless numbers man (which I suppose you have to be in this business, even if you are an editor), said that publishers needed to spend more time making phone calls and sending letters. He noted that publishers were resonsible for more books per editor.

Liz Nagle said that she had lots of success with Yiddish with Dick and Jane at Little Brown courtesy of Vidlit (which was discussed here yesterday). The Vidlit Flash shorts were emailed from person-to-person. But even this innnovative success is not what Little Brown is spending all of its days doing this.

If I had to peg the smartest and most open-minded person on the panel, I’d say that it was Kate Travers. Unlike the other panelists, Travers immediately cut to the chasm between the publishing community and the public community. She compared the hardcover with the oldest child (the glamour child), the forefront symbol of literature and the paperback as the cute little child. The original trade paperback, meaning books that are published directly to trade paperback without benefit of a hardcover release (books along the lines of The Interpeter of Maladies and Bright Lights, Big City), was something of an awkward middle child, but she adamantly supported it, pointing out that it had not received enough recognition as a viable format.

Travers bemoaned the fact that publishers don’t want to gamble on new authors. Her mission as an editor is to fulfill the life of a book and destroy the perception that an original TPB is “not good enough for hardcover.” But she said this situation is changing.

Blake weighed in with the hard economics. If a publisher commits to an original TPB, then they need to be confident that it will be $60,000. Because you’re only talking about $1 per book. An original TPB needs to hit the bestseller list to make its money back.

Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land was brought up. When asked about how much Lipsyte was paid for the book, Stein responded, “It was criminal how low we paid out.”

Zeitchik, perhaps making up for the previous day’s inadequate discussion on the subject, brought up the 18-34 question and what responsibilities editors had to this crowd.

Travers, again demonstrating some pragmatism on this subject, pointed out that literature was in a serious crisis vis-a-vis younger readers. She pointed out that people in their late twenties still reach for a video game and, as Gillian Blake also pointed out, don’t necessarily spend their Sunday afternoons reading a book for a few hours. If they do buy a book, they’d rather wait the extra year for the trade paperback than shell out the twenty-five bucks. She hoped that there could be an alliance built to back up editors and pointed out the authors being stolen away from the small presses.

Jackson remarked that the pie has to get bigger, so that books will draw young adults. One of his titles, Angry Black White Boy, was a success because of its marketing. Crown had distributed stickers, mix CDs and even put up a graffiti wall. These were concrete efforts to pitch to young audiences in what he called an “authentic” way . He also noted that because of Def Poetry Jam, young teenagers stood around the block to get into a poetry reading. He insisted that “the audience is there.”

Zeitchik brought up the previous day’s resistance on the 18-34 panel, noting that many people in the audience expressed resistance that this audience was not thinking commercially (or even practically) about this pivotal audience.

Travers pined for a more collective atmosphere and hoped that open forums such as book fairs (one of which she was organizing in Brooklyn) could get people talking about literature again.

Stein had the novel idea of reintroducing corporate mandates for literary publishing, pointing out that this used to be a practice among the big houses.

Blake confessed that today’s books might very well be a matter of publishing work that these editors are proud of when they’re old and tired. Literary publishing is equally unforgiving with young and hip editors.

Jackson said that today’s publishers and editors needed to be more connected with the bookstore atmosphere. He said he had learned a lot because his wife had opened up a bookstore and that this had transformed his understanding. At Random House, staffers went to various Wal-Marts to observe how people bought books and how they selected them, gauging their excitement and lack of excitement w/r/t their choices.

Nagle was willing to go further by having Little Brown employees work in a bookstore for a week.

Blake suggested that publishers were “punished for their success.” The problem with finding the next Kite Runner is that the shareholders will demand more money the following year and that they would then be paying outrageous sums to the same author for a repeat success. She insisted that, in most cases, the first book would sell the most, implying very strongly that this author payouts were a signinficant problem.

Stein’s hard statement: “Give me a book that sells 300,000 copies. I don’t care how crummy it is, I’ll publish it.”

Jackson said that the problem isn’t so much demand, but the bidding wars that come with a hot title.

Blake singled out another problem: retail returns. If a book is likely to be marked down, where’s the incentive to order extra copies if the customer or the retailer knows that they’re going ot pay less later.

Small presses do play into the consciousness. Stein remarked that since it is easier to publish a book these days with advancing technologies, a small publisher is almost on the same footing as one of the big boys. There has been diversity despite the growing conglomeration.

Traver suggested that self-publishing shouldn’t be ignored. She singled out The Rules of the Game, a book that she had seen people reading on the subways. She was unable to find the book, but learned that people had bought this on the street. After Bookscanning the title, she learned that it had sold 200,000 copies.

CONCLUSIONS:

Zeitchik was a very good moderator, constantly keeping the conversation flowing with seminal questions. But the panel, which hoped to tackle many important questions, only created more.

The gist I seemed to get here is that today’s publishers, even the more literary-minded ones, are almost completely out of step with today’s audiences. Random House’s trip to Wal-Mart is a start, but I’m mystified why they didn’t go to a bookstore — seeing as how most people of a book-minded persuasion are going to go to a place that specializes in books. Call me practical, but this might be the behavior that is worth observing.

Further, since there are few guarantees that a publisher might be profitable, Stein’s hard idea about literary mandates is a good one. As much as these editors bemoaned the “everyone is reading the same book” school of thought, their companies are dictated by finding the next Dan Brown . And it was interesting to see their editorial attitudes reflecting this.

The other lingering question: are publishers responsible to some degree for the dropoff in reading with the 18-34 crowd? If they are not fully accessing them, then should they be allocating more resources to this? Or is this too much of a long-term financial thing even for Random House?

Television and community awareness seems to have played a seminal part in promoting reading. But so has the Internet with the Vidlit idea. If the publishing industry moves at the rate of a dinosaur and the act of consuming media only accelerates, is it little wonder then why readership has dropped?

* * *

I still have a remarkable amount of data here to process, but I’m running late on little sleep and much coffee and I again have too many things that I’m doing today. Factor in the ridiculous amount of books I have to ship back to San Francisco and you see my dilemma. I hope to get more pictures up today and brief reportage and another massive post up tomorrow. I’m sitting on two minidiscs of interviews, which includes the publisher of the 2005 Man Booker International winner. More to come.

I will say that I agree with Mark. I’ve had enough of these panels. They are essentially repetitions on the same two themes: the “future of publishing” and whatever misunderstood technology happens to be percolating at the moment. I’m also inclined to observe that this industry seems to be a matter of endlesly putting things into action and I suppose has enough returns to keep it self-supporting. But while this has allowed it to preservere through the 20th century, the 21st century, with its Amazons and its Oprahs, includes far more variables for a venture than meets the eye. This may in fact be good for the small publisher who is attuned to the book-buying public and might explain why niche publishers are doing so well.

But for the big boys, and even the mid-sized folks, the answer to me seems startlingly clear: become aware of the shifting paradigms (which, yes, includes book blogs) and dare to put your money where your mouth is. Or to put it succinctly:

Adapt or perish.

Additional coverage of BEA can be found at Chekhov’s Mistress, Beatrice, and of course, the Elegant Variation. We just caught sight of a guy who is either Stephen Elliott or who looks like Stephen Elliott. There are bagpipes playing downstairs — presumably because lots of Scottish folks read books or Irvine Welsh is primed to make a surprise appearance.

I’ll report more later in the afternoon. If you need to get in touch with us by email, we’re having server problems. Try arizona_jim@yahoo.com.

Signing off. There’s boatloads of people here.

It’s a veritable boon for Pauline Kael and James Thurber completists. For one Ben Franklin, eighty years of The New Yorker will be available in DVD format. This is probably the best idea since Broderbund issued all of the issues of MAD Magazine on CD-ROM.

I’m howling with laughter over how the City and the 49ers will handle this, particularly since the stunning video embarassment is readily available online. Offensive stereotypes, girl-on-girl action, homophobia, racism, and the 49ers — much of it shot in Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office.

Political corruption hasn’t been this fun to watch this since Marion Barry’s cocaine video.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: While we’re on the move, Lauren Baratz-Logsted was kind enough to offer us an essay about her experiences with reading reactions.]

I didn’t set out to write books that would piss people off.

Of course, when it happens, I don’t mind it so much – at least, I’ve come not to mind it so much. When I sit down to write, since I primarily write books of a comic or satirical nature, my intention is to create something that will make people laugh and, between the laughs, think.

As far as intentions go, when I originally left my day job as an independent bookseller back in 1994, I didn’t plan on writing comedy or satire. I thought, like many a bright-eyed writer jumping into the fray, that I was going to write the Great American Novel. But I don’t think any writer can control her natural voice any more than she can control her tendency to check her Amazon numbers on an hourly basis. But the big surprise was that, when I sat down to write, the voice that came out was a decidedly comic one.

My first novel, The Thin Pink Line, was published in 2003. On the surface, the book is about a self-obsessed Londoner who fakes an entire pregnancy. But if you scratch the surface, you’ll also find a scathing indictment of the notion that, all too often in life, people make life-altering choices (marriage, children, et al.) – all because “everyone else is doing it.” Sometimes, they avoid serious thought about what the decision actually means.

When my book hit the stacks, things began well enough. All the pre-pub reviews were positive: Kirkus gave it a starred review with PW calling it “hilarious and original,” blah blah blah. What writer wouldn’t want to hear that? Particularly the “blah blah blah” part. But then the Amazon reviews started popping up and I realized I’d done something unexpected: I’d written a book that polarized audiences. If you look at my page there, you’ll see that out of my 100 reviews, half are for five stars, while the other half are one-stars. Not that reviews have any affect on my writing. And that’s not to say I don’t care at all about what people think. But if at the end of the day I’m proud of something I’ve created, then that has to be enough. I always like to say that I’ve been compared, variously, to Swift and shit.

While I respect the right of readers to hold the latter view, I hope no one will hold it against me if I prefer the former. As for the one-stars, they mostly seem upset about a single thing: they hate what my character does! Now, we don’t even need to get into the issue of people picking up a book that’s cover actually says the character fakes an entire pregnancy and then getting upset when she does, in fact, fake an entire pregnancy. The point is that I’d struck a nerve with people, many of them fundamentalist in temperament, who misconstrued things a bit, obviously believing that I (as the author) was endorsing Jane Taylor’s behavior.

I’ve come to realize that if readers don’t get that a book is satire from the get-go – satire being defined in my Webster’s Tenth as “a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule and scorn; trenchant wit, irony or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly” – they miss the point of the exercise entirely, preventing themselves from enjoying the book. If I had to pick just one area of writing that is most likely to be misunderstood by an American audience, it would have to be satire. Before Helen Fielding and Nick Hornby opened American editors’ eyes to a new way of seeing, I regularly received rejections from publishers saying that while they thought the material was hysterical, they didn’t believe Americans liked comic novels or satire. And now that a lot of comedy and satire is published here, there is still a problem in that publishers are so bent on presenting heroines as being likable, as being “the girl next door,” that readers are understandably confused when they find those heroines doing over-the-top things like, say, faking an entire pregnancy. My characters are almost never girls next door. In fact, you probably wouldn’t want to live next door to my characters! But, hopefully, if you read the books, you’ll laugh a few times at the things they get themselves up to. And maybe you’ll find yourself thinking in the process.

And now I’ve written a third book, A Little Change of Face. And again, some readers have completely missed the point of the exercise.

A Little Change of Face is about Scarlett Jane Stein, a very attractive, 39-year-old, unmarried, Jewish librarian from Danbury who, for one reason and another, decides to sabotage her own looks in order to find out how the world will treat her once she’s no longer a swan.

So far, so good. No one had any trouble with that part.

However, they did have a problem with one of the supporting characters, T.B. (standing for Token Black).

Romance Reader at Heart, a website devoted to romance novels, wrote, “As if that name is not ridiculous enough, Scarlett and her friends talk in Ebonics while in TB’s company (TB is a lawyer and obviously uses Standard English). I am not even black and I found this offensive.” And the ubiquitous Harriet Klausner, who described my clearly British protagonist Jane Taylor as “Turkish” in a review of my previous book, The Thin Pink Line, weighed in with the following, “…and Scarlett speaking hip hop with a black attorney pal seem inane for educated people and clearly in poor taste. Simply Scarlett needs to dump her best pal and treat TB (don’t ask) with respect maybe the love of her life will do likewise.” Ah, well, grammar notwithstanding, at least Harriet gave me five stars anyway.

Sometimes, when in doubt, I’ve learned to let crazy Jane Taylor do my talking for me. Here’s Jane, talking about her problems getting the wording regarding race right in my second novel, Crossing the Line:

I hadn’t known many black people in my life, but what few I’d known, I’d liked. Oh, I do know that sounds like one of those backhanded compliments, like when someone says, “Some of my best friends are Jewish” – which really is true in my case, but only in the singular, since my best friend, no ‘s’, is David and he is Jewish. (At least, I’m pretty sure he is; he never really talks about it.) And, anyway, what would be better, to say that some of my enemies are Jewish or that the few black people I’d known I’d hated? Neither of which would be true, of course. As a white Christian, my random sampling of other races and religions was just too limited to make any kind of meaningful sweeping generalizations. All of this said, if anyone else ever comes up with a way to say, “I’m not a racist” without people automatically knee-jerking to “Ah, she’s a racist” or “I’ve liked what few black people I’ve known” without sounding like some kind of insufferable prig, please drop me a line.

Oh, and here’s one last interesting part on that subject: I can say “I hadn’t known many black people in my life, but what few I’d known, I’d liked” and fully realize that there will be some who will find the remark offensive. And yet, any remark I make about the white people I’ve known would have to be more offensive, the truth being that having known a ton of white people in my life, there had been precious few I’d genuinely liked. So there.

Jane, as most readers agree, is often nuts on most subjects, but here she’s saying something that makes sense to me and it relates directly to A Little Change of Face and the problematic – for some readers – character of T.B.

For intelligent readers who read the book closely, I don’t think they’ll have a problem seeing what I’ve done here. I’ve created a character who is an indictment of the fact that, however far we may think we have come since the Civil Rights Movement, all too often, in books and on TV and in film, African-Americans are still relegated to supporting roles in our society. As T.B. says to Scarlett when they first meet, referring to her own nickname, “I am the movies, and TV too…I’s the judge and the pediatrician and the prosecutor…I’s the local color, I’s the next-door neighbor, I’s the best friend who gets killed so the star can get angry…I’s expendable.”

And anyone who is willing to take a hard look at the entertainment industry would have to honestly agree, she’s right. Friends, one of the most successful sitcoms in history, and even set in New York City – New York City! – is about as white a show as there ever was. And just look at the three people who die in the beginning of Jurassic Park: the fat guy, the smoker and the black man – this is Hollywood’s definition of who’s expendable.

But Scarlett doesn’t see T.B. as expendable and says as much. Indeed, she refers to TB as “the glue” and anyone reading closely should see that as well. T.B. is the female character that Scarlett is most consistently honest with as T.B. is with her. T.B. is the female character who most consistently provides Scarlett with unconditional love and support and, again, it goes both ways. As for what is inaccurately characterized as Ebonics in the book, I’d have to wonder if someone who could see such a shadow where none exists might not be carrying around their own collection of racial guilt or if they’ve ever even had any close friends of another race at all.

Here’s some of my own personal history and you can take it for what it’s worth:

When I was twelve years old, both my best friend and my boyfriend were black, and while the latter is mostly forgotten, the former still blazes clear in my mind 30 years later and will for as long as I have memory. Stephen King, another writer who’s been maligned for other issues than I have, does occasionally get things right . In his novella Stand By Me, he passes a remark that has stuck with me in essence all these years: the best friends you will ever have are the ones you have when you are 12 years old.

As far as I am concerned, the character of T.B. is as much a tribute to that friendship as it is anything else. It is a tribute to two young girls, both very short, who played basketball together and talked slang together. Despite both of the girls being highly educated, they often lapsed into the vernacular that T.B. and Scarlett used. They laughed and loved and argued so much sometimes it made the fans in the stands uncomfortable.

I know in my heart that even if the entire rest of the world reaches misimpressions about the character of T.B., that young girl that I loved so much, Donna, would totally understand.

I do realize that, as writers, we do not get the luxury of sitting on every readers’ shoulder – I’m picturing a very mini-me here, perched on your shoulder, a glass of Shiraz in my hand – directing the reader’s attention to what’s important in the work, explaining jokes that don’t go over at all, or correcting misimpressions. But one still does hope for intelligent readers, readers who can be depended upon not to mistake an uber-British Londoner for a Turkish woman. And, maybe just occasionally, readers who are intelligent enough to see that what others might perceive as racism is in fact anything but.

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Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of The Thin Pink Line and Crossing the Line. Her third novel, A Little Change of Face, will be published in July 2005. Her essay, “If Jane Austen Were Writing Today,” is collected in Flirting with Pride and Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece, edited by Jennifer Crusie and due out from Benbella Books on September 1.