So after my lengthy post about the process between first draft and publication, many of you took the opportunity of my mentioning advanced reader’s copies of Goliath to beg for said ARCS. Well, I don’t do my own publicity, thus staying above the fray of people asking for free books, but for once I’ll make an exception . . .
Go donate to @maureenjohnson’s #lastlittleshelterbox campaign on Twitter, or via her blog post here, and you’ll be in the running win a Goliath ARC.
Plus, you’ll be helping get shelter to people who, thanks to mudslides and earthquakes, are sleeping under rainy skies tonight. This is a good thing.
More cool stuff soon.
I’m liking this German cover of Behemoth, which follows the original flavor Leviathan cover rather faithfully:
According to Google Translate, Im Labyrinth der Macht means “In the labyrinth of power.” Pretty good tag line for the book.
Comes out from CBJ in Germany on April 24, 2011.
Note that this isn’t what the US cover would have looked like if the redux hadn’t happened. This is:
Leave all complaints and compliments in the comment thread below.
In my last post, I answered questions about my recently finished Goliath rewrites. But one answer got rather long and has become its own blog post.
Which would be this blog post here. So, take it away, Gaia:
Now that you’ve turned in the [second draft], what sort of sausage-maker does Goliath get churned through between now and September? What are the steps that take it from “writer submits finished product†to “ravenous fans purchase and devour�
This is a process with a lot of steps, which is why it takes from now till September, and oftentimes more than a year to complete. Here’s a rough guide to everything that’s going on. (Note that I know more about authorly stuff than the rest. Publishing industry folks, feel free to correct me—though every house differs in the details.)
Copyedits
My editor reads this new draft, casting aside the fact that she read the first draft many times already, and is unlikely to be surprised by the plot twists or find the jokes terribly funny anymore. This is an editor superpower that I do not have.
She may request more rewrites (hopefully much less extensive), but if the draft seems to be basically sound she sends it to a copyeditor.
(Let’s get something straight: editor and copyeditor are VERY different positions. My editor is the person I’ve worked with at S&S for many years. She commissioned the series ages ago, and has been part of its creation from even before I wrote a word. Bu the copyeditor is someone who I might never meet in person, and who’s probably a freelancer. So the copyeditor is taking a fresh look at the work, unencumbered by previous knowledge and expectations and unbedazzled by my personal charms.)
The copyeditor reads the whole book and does these things:
1) Corrects grammar, punctuation, and spelling, of course.
2) Verifies spelling consistency with the first two books. For example, in 1914 “Zeppelin” was capitalized, but these days it’s not. We decided to go with modern usage. It’s the CE’s job to make sure I didn’t forget any of these series-level decisions.
3) Makes a timeline for the events of the book, which assures that characters don’t go to bed on Monday night and wake up on Thursday morning. (Or whatever.) I already have a timeline of my own (because I am a good author!), but the CE is making their timeline only using the evidence in the book. So this should reveal if I’ve made any mistakes.
4) Checks historical facts and stuff.
5) Does other things I’ve forgotten, because I am an ungrateful author.
My editor looks at these copyedits first, to shield my delicate eyes from umbrage. (For example, the copyeditor of Leviathan tried to change the spelling of “aeroplane” to “airplane,” which I would not have survived.) Then the copyedited manuscript is sent to me, and I go through them for about two weeks. In each case, I either accept the changes, defy them completely, or make a different change, solving the CE’s problem a different way. Defying a CE is called “stetting,” because you write “STET” next to it. “Stet” is Latin for “let it stand,” because we publishing types are a CLASSY PEOPLE.
Proofs
This heavily marked up masterpiece goes to Production at S&S, where they lay out pages along with the art. (Note that Keith is still working on the art as I type. He should be done by the end of this month.) This creates “page proofs,” a version of the book that looks like it will when it’s done, with the same font and such, but is not bound. However, wrongness and typos will exist, so it goes to a “proofreader.”
The proofreader does these things:
1) Also corrects grammar, punctuation, spelling.
2) Gets rid of “widows” and “orphans.”
3) Makes sure that non-standard characters (like Alek’s mom’s family, the House of Croÿ) have made it from the manuscript to this stage intact.
4) Makes sure there aren’t weird-looking typographical artifacts, like the same word piled on top of itself for three lines in a row. In any novel, this stuff happens randomly, and if left unfixed it breaks the reader out of the story. The proofreader just breaks a line somewhere above the pile-up, by adding a premature hard return, and the problem usually goes away like magic.
5) Other magic stuff that I’ve forgotten.
I get a copy of these proofread proofs (as does my editor, who as you can tell is there beside me at every stage). I go through them to make sure nothing has gone wrong with the corrections, still wielding the magic power of STET. I also check the art at this point. Usually one or two pieces of art is missing, and about a dozen pieces need to be moved. This last part is ANNOYING.
Let’s say there’s a full-page piece of art, and I want the reader to see it while reading the text on page 100. But the designer put the art on page 99, so the art spoils the surprise in the text. Argh.
Okay, so I move the art to page 100. Problem solved!
But that means that page 99 is now empty, so the text in question slides forward onto page 99 to fill that space. Note that odd-numbered pages are always on the right-hand side of an open book, so the reader won’t see the art on page 100 until AFTER they’ve finished page 99 and turned the page. Now the art is TOO LATE!
AND THERE IS NO SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM.
Well, I could rewrite the book somewhere else to slide stuff around, but that would just mess up something somewhere else. So I make do. (Keith and I have partially solved this problem by avoiding art that is entirely text dependant, that is, which has to be seen by the reader at an EXACT point in the story.)
This mass of scribblings all goes back to Production, who change stuff graciously and without complaint.
Then the “second-pass page proofs” come to me, and I realize that the ONE WORD that I deleted on page 187 has shifted things so that a piece of art on page 345 is now on page 344, which is the WRONG PLACE!
So I fiddle and move and shift, trying to get it all to work, like a prisoner solving a Rubrik’s Cube by passing hand-written notes to the dude in the next cell who actually has the frickin’ cube, but is slightly color blind. Well, sort of.
But somewhere around the third-pass page proofs the book has finally been made perfect, or we all politely pretend that it is, and it goes to the printer to become . . .
Advanced Reader’s Copies
Advanced Reader’s Copies are a special, cheap-paper print run for publicity purposes. They are sent to buyers at major chains, indie bookstore owners, well-connected librarians, book clubs, reviewers, my agent, bloggers who beg really well, and me, roughly in that order. (This is mid-May, because Book Expo America is in late May, and cannot be missed.)
I usually crack open one of the ARCs that I’ve been given, using it as a set of fourth-pass pageproofs. Changes can still be made. (But I don’t read the text at this point, because I can’t seriously stand it by now.)
Orders
Then comes a great ordering process, where a mighty sales force goes out to talk to bookstores and chains. The buyers there listen to the pitch, read the book and judge its cover, then look at how many Leviathans and Behemoths sold (and how quickly, and where), and finally and pick a nice round number for how many they want on their shelves on week one, and how many in reserve (printed and held, but not shipped to them right away). Organizations like the Junior Library Guild (a book club for libraries, basically) order en masse for their members, while big library systems order for themselves, as do many individual libraries. (Scholastic Book Club also gets into the action, but a little later.)
All these numbers are crunched and mangled on a really vast and glorious spreadsheet that S&S actually sent me once (see “personal charms” above), and this combination of math and BookScanomancy determines the size of the first print run. (This is in the low six figures for the likes of me.) This number is then multiplied by three and announced to a credulous and trusting world as the Official First Printing of Goliath.
Places like the Science Fiction Book Club take a different route, and prepare to print their own copies, so they can offer their members cheaper prices. (Scholastic Book Club often does this, but they love the Leviathan series’ fancy-doodle paper, and so use S&S copies. Much appreciated.)
Around this time I also get page proofs from Australia, because Penguin Oz likes to Australianise the text, turning “flavor” to “flavour” and “Dr.” to “Dr”. But they print at the same time as S&S US because of the fancy-doodle paper thing. (I appreciate youse all!)
(Note that S&S UK doesn’t send me page proofs, because they keep my American spellings. So that’s one less thing to do. And none of the foreign editions are part of this process, because other languages have their own entirely separate publishing schedules. They have to translate the whole thing, after all.)
Printing
We are swiftly leaving my areas of expertise, but at some point in, like, August or whatever, giant presses in some state with lots of vowels in its name roll and make a bunch of books. Then they print covers and stick them on, and then there are boxes and palettes and stuff. They go to an S&S warehouse or to various distributors’ warehouses, or something, but I pay no attention because . . .
My good friends in S&S Publicity have started calling magazines and other media outlets asking if anyone wants to interview me, and then they start arranging the Goliath tour!
We have meetings about marketing strategies and blog tours and whatever, and it starts to get exciting again. For one thing, no one is making me look at PAGE PROOFS. And for another, I know that soon I will be basking in the warm glowing warmth of your fannish adulations. I buy a few tweedy philosophy professor jackets for events, and start trimming down to prepare for my two-month diet of hotel room-service cheese!
And all this time, usually, I’m writing my next book, which I finish the first draft of in the nick of time. But in this case, I won’t be doing that. Instead, I will be working on a bunch of Secret Projects, each one more secret than the last, which I hope that you will be enjoying in 2012.
If you want to know what those secret projects are, come to Comic Con in San Diego. And if you can’t do that, maybe the nice people at Comic Con will allow those who do make it to use the internet.
Or just stay tuned here in late July.
In my last post, I announced that I just finished my second draft of Goliath, and invited questions in the comments. Here are my answers:
How long does it generally take you to write a first draft?
I started Goliath in early January, so nine months in this case. The rewrites took about five weeks. (I also do two months of touring a year, and usually take a month off after that. Plus there’s all the other editorial stages to come. It all adds up to more than a year per book. Yes, I used to write much faster, but I got old.)
I know Extras had a complete rehaul upon rewriting––was there anything in the Leviathan series (any of the books) that has changed majorly from draft to publication?
For those of you who didn’t know, about 16,000 words of the first draft of Extras had to be changed from Hiro’s to Aya’s POV, when I realized that Aya was doing all the cool stuff. That was a pain.
Here’s an excerpt of the first version.
No rewrites of that magnitude happened in the Leviathan series, though the endings to both books 1 and 3 were changed a lot. As I said yesterday, Goliath‘s ending was expanded by several chapters to cover all the stuff I wanted closure on. With Leviathan, I had to do a more structural refit. Here’s what happened:
In the first draft, the eggs hatched at the end of Book 1, and Bovril’s first word (“Constantinople”) was the last word of Leviathan. But Bovril was so cute that it made the end a bit too light-hearted, so the hatching got moved 16 chapters into Book 2, where I used it to interrupt Alek’s escape. (This was my editor’s idea, and she was totally right.)
How long before the inevitable ARC giveaway, so that we can plan our stalking of your blog accordingly, in hopes of reading the book as soon as possible?
I don’t do ARC giveaways here, because I am quite bad at MAILING THINGS. But ARCS will appear at Book Expo America in late May, and will probably start bouncing around on blogs shortly thereafter.
During the forum meet up you mentioned more Croy. Care to explain more?
This question thread is about Goliath! (But there’s a hint somewhere below.)
So does this mean that Jaspert will make a reappearance in Goliath?
Not everyone appears again, but we do at least know where they are. Like, all the key people are mentioned in one way or another. But we will also see some old faces. (Vague much?)
So um, I have a probably really annoying question but—when does the uglies movie come out? Or is it still in production?
It is not in production. Believe it or not, it’s still in the script phase. (I mean, it was only optioned SIX YEARS ago. Patience!)
Now that you’ve turned in the final product, what sort of sausage-maker does Goliath get churned through between now and September? What are the steps that take it from “writer submits finished product†to “ravenous fans purchase and devour�
This answer turned into a whole post, which will appear tomorrow or the next day!
Does Volger know that Deryn has feelings for Alek? I feel as if it was alluded to, but I am not quite sure.
You mean in Behemoth? Well, he did guess she was a girl partly because she got “a bit screechy” when talking about Alek, like worrying about him too much. So I think he knows that she has a crush. (Volger would at least be concerned that she does, given that he’s already been through this fall-in-love-with-a-commoner-thing with Alek’s father.)
What are you going to do now? I don’t mean like writing a new book but you know, what are you going to do while Goliath goes through publishing?
See tomorrow’s post for my Goliath-related duties. But personal time-wise, I’m hanging out in Sydney doing the usual: getting into internet slapfights (ahem), watching cricket, designing a card game (a weird hobby of mine), cooking Turkish food, and working on a S3Krit PRojEct that will be announced at Comic Con. (This is what I meant by “I probably won’t answer spoilery questions, except in cheating, non-useful ways that only drive you more insane!” Bwah-hah-hah!)
I’ll also be going to LeakyCon, because this year their YA thread is being curated by the esteemed and undiagnosable Maureen Johnson!
Is there already a date for the third of my beloved audio books?
Certain nameless online retailers list September 11, 2011. Two days before the print edition? Odd but possibly true. Usually S&S Audio tries to get it out the same day. For Behemoth that was impossible, due to Alan Cumming’s movie star schedule, but hopefully this time it will work more easily.
Will the release date also be September 13 in Great Britain?
Not sure. Release dates in the UK tends to be less “hard” (for my books, anyway). That is, they come out over a couple of weeks, drifting onto shelves rather than all slamming down on the same day.
When Dr.Barlow finds out that Alek named his perspicacious loris Bovril she seamed really upset but I’m wondering if that really disturbes her or if she’s just not used to beasts having their own names. (The second confuses me because Dr.Barlow did name both of her message parrots in the first book.)
Nice continuity catch. The parrots were experimental, and wound up with names, true. But it’s one thing for Dr. Barlow and her lab cronies to name their beasts, quiet another for a common soldier to do so. (You didn’t think Dr. Barlow had to follow her own rules, did you?)
So when will you be optioning these stories to Hollywood?
Conversations are being had. Watch this blog.
If the book’s done they what happens to it in between the release date and now?
As I said, see my next post.
Do you mind us calling you Scott? my mom thinks we should call you Mr. Westerfeld and I was just wondering!
Scott is just fine, though Scott-la is also acceptable.
Just in case you missed it on the Twitter machine, I finished the rewrites to Goliath, the final book in the Leviathan trilogy, last Tuesday.
This was a tricky series, requiring much more research and infinitely more art direction than anything I’ve ever done before. The fact is that each of these books took more than a year to write. They only came out a year apart because a) I started the first one a long time before it found a home at Simon & Schuster, b) and S&S have been kind enough to let me turn in this third one a bit late.
But it’s done. w00t! Time off!
And now onto your imaginary questions. (I’m in a fake dialog-y mood these days.)
So these are the “rewrites”. How much did you change?
Well, I turned in the first draft in October, the day before Cassandra Claire’s wedding and three days before my giant tour started—so, um, kind of at the last possible minute. That first draft may have been a BIT rushed. In fact, it was 3,000 words shorter than the rewrites I just turned in, mostly because the ending now has three whole new chapters. (To point out the obvious: Endings are rushed when writers don’t have enough time, because most folks write their books more or less in order.)
The first draft also had missing sections in other places, with labels like [MORE CRAZY STUFF HERE] and [FINISH DESCRIPTION AFTER KEITH DRAWS IT]. Those are all replaced with real writing now . . . I hope.
So “rewrite” means “just add more stuff”?
Well, no. That’s the most noticeable aspect of this particular rewrite, but not the most important. The most critical thing I did was to look at the character arcs (particularly the relationship between Two Very Important Characters) and make sure they were consistent, dramatic, and had their own beginning, middle, and end.
Also, there were special concerns because this is a Last Book. Like, I made sure that all the characters who have appeared across the series have at least one more shout out each, so we know where they all are at the end. I also tried to hit each of the underlying themes of the series (loyalty, duty, destiny, friendship, uncomfortable allies, mixing of technologies, the importance of truth, the importance of lies, and the badness of war) in ways that felt conclusive.
Wait. Last book? But there’s only been three! Don’t you know the secret meaning of trilogy?
Um, right. What I meant was that the three Leviathan novels are done. There’s still the Manual of Aeronautics to come. This book four, which may have a different title, will be a Spiderwick Field Guide-like large-format book of Keith’s art.
It’s going to be awesome, with big, full-color deck plans of the Leviathan, cutaways of the Stormwalker, and lovely portraits of many beasties, machines, and uniforms. Finally you will know what color everything is! There are also a few how-to diagrams, like Huxley Semaphore and sliding escapes.
It comes out in October 2012.
That’s ages away. When does Goliath come out?”
Well, it was supposed to be released October 4, 2011. But that has been changed to . . .
SEPTEMBER 13, 2011! That’s right, it’s coming out three weeks earlier!
Cool! Um, but if you were late, why is it coming out earlier?
I don’t know. I just work here.
So how long is Goliath?
It is 94,000 words, and I don’t know how many pages yet. For comparison, Leviathan was 79,000 words and Behemoth was 85,000 words. Inflation!
That means you did more pictures, right?
Well, Leviathan had 50 images, Behemoth had 55, and Goliath has 56 confirmed so far, and it should be more.
(These counts includes the end papers, spot art, and full-page art.)
Will you be spoiling some of these pieces for us?
Yup. Probably March 1 for the first one, and every first of the month after. So that’s (*counts on fingers*) seven pieces of pre-released art in all.
Plus we’ll obviously spoil the cover, which should be fairly soon. (I have seen a rough version and you haven’t. Neeners to all!)
What are you doing next?
That is the subject for another blog post. (Soon, baby, soon.)
Um, I’m out of questions.
Yeah, I’m sure you are, because you’re not even real. But if the many fine commenters on this blog have more questions about Goliath, etc., they should ask them!
Note: I probably won’t answer spoilery questions, except in cheating, non-useful ways that only drive you more insane! But feel free to ask them.
If you came to this blog for the Leviathan fan art, maybe you should skip this post. But if you have a few minutes to kill, you’ll see what goes on inside the heads of writers when they deal with media kerfuffles about their books.
But first a little background . . .
Last week (decades ago in internet time) an organization called BitchMedia made a list of 100 YA Novels for the Feminist Reader. There was great celebration on the YA interweebz, because the list included many fine novels. Moreover, certain writers of a certain vintage always liked Bitch Magazine when it was an edgy west coast zine in the late 1990s, and being listed by it provided validation to our aging souls.
But then bad things happened. A handful of commenters on the blog questioned three of the titles: Jackson Pearce’s Sisters Red, Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels, and Elizabeth Scott’s Living Dead Girl. A weekend later, BitchMedia decided to yank them. A few hours after that some of us authors on the list (Maureen Johnson, Justine Larbalestier, Diana Peterfreund, E. Lockhart, Ellen Klages, and possibly more) commented to express our disappointment and request that our own books be removed from the list.
If you go to that post now, you’ll find several hundred comments of varying degrees of relevance, vitriol, and snark. I have waded in a few places, but it’s a red hot mess over there. So to better address all the questions directed at me (or not to me) in one place, allow me to share with you this dialog, in which I mercilessly decimate a straw man.
In other words, here’s all the stuff that goes through us writers’ heads while we are reacting to examples of not-quite-censorship:
Q: Why are you so crazy angry about this?
A: I’m more disappointed than angry. Particularly saddening was these words from the staffers at BitchMedia about one of the challenged titles: “This book came as a recommendation to us from a few feminists, and while we knew that some of the content was difficult, we weren’t tuned into what you’ve just brought up. A couple of us at the office have decided to spend the rest of our weekend re-considering this choice by reading the book.”
Hmm, by “reading the book.” A good place to start, and yet . . .
Just put your mind in this staffer’s place. You go out into the YA world and ask for recommendations for a 100-long list of books. You don’t read them all, of course, because you are an un- or little-paid staffer at a blog, not the frickin’ Printz Committee. When your list is posted, suddenly someone is accusing three of these books of being morally bankrupt and evil. So you hunker down and read 1000 pages over two days, with these comments lingering uppermost in your mind. You may not have a firm grip on why your original sources recommended the book, because you haven’t asked them specifically to respond to the disparaging comments. And you don’t have time to think about the issues raised here in comparison to those raised in the other books on the list, because you also haven’t read all of those either. So you cave into the tiny group of protesters, because that seems easier, especially having just read the books with those commenters’ objections in mind.
In other words, this whole process unfolded in much the same way that school library challenges do. A small group of people complain, and then people who haven’t really read these books before hearing awful things about them (and who, more important, haven’t immersed themselves in the entire set of books involved, challenged and unchallenged) have to make a snap decision.
This is what has disappointed me and many others, because we’d thought better of BitchMedia.
Q: But this isn’t like a library challenge, because the books aren’t being physically removed from anywhere!
A: True, my analogy here (Maureen’s originally) compares these events to a library challenge. But in analogies, some things are the same and some are different. If every point of comparison were the same, it wouldn’t be an analogy, it would just be the same thing—a library challenge. That’s what “analogy” means.
And yet despite its differences to actual library challenges, we believe this is still an important case, because we felt this list was important. It provided visibility for books we thought were great to a potentially new readership outside the normal YA world. Erasing books from this list was a way of making them invisible to that audience. And the people who work ceaselessly to make the books they don’t like disappear should be fought, whether they’re physically removing the books, removing them from databases or awards, or simply making them harder to find. Letting those voices win pisses us authors off.
Q: But it’s BitchMedia’s list. Don’t they have the right to change it?
A: They do. And I have the right to point out how pathetically they did so. This is about holding them to a higher editorial standard than they displayed, not claiming any legal or constitutional right.
Q: So you aren’t fighting censorship?
A: The answer to that question is long and boring and semantic. But without a doubt we are calling out wishy-washy editorial practices that mimic many of the same processes as censorship. (By using analogies. We love them!)
Q: But you didn’t just point out BitchMedia’s editorial shortcomings, you demanded your book be taken off the list.
A: I didn’t demand, I asked, using the word “please” and everything.
Asking to be removed from the list is a communication strategy. To point out the obvious, everything going on here—the list, the comments, this post—is communication. Asking to be removed was a way of displaying my strong feeling that the list was made less legitimate by their editorial practices.
For example, if a list had a few books on it that were paid endorsements, and my books were placed on it as a way to make that list look more “real,” I would make a similar request. The manner in which a list is compiled (or edited) matters, and it matters rather more to me when my name is used on it.
Q: But no one PAID to have these books removed!
A: Please look up “analogy” in the dictionary.
Q: Whatever. If someone’s book was removed from a library’s shelves, you would ask for your books to be removed too?
A: No, that would be silly. Again, the library analogy is only useful in regards to how this happened, and to some of its effects. Not in every particular.
Q: But isn’t it ironic that your response to a book being removed from a list is to try to have your own book removed from that list?
A: Not really. The strategy is explained above.
Q: But isn’t it ironic that your enemies in this affair wanted to change this list by commenting on a blog, and you also tried to CHANGE THIS LIST BY COMMENTING ON THAT SAME BLOG!
A: No, that’s just how discourse works sometimes. But you and Alanis Morissette should totally get a room.
Q: So you think you’re so great that if Uglies was taken off the list, no one would take the list seriously?
A: Most people wouldn’t notice the absence of any one book, but the demand itself is a useful rhetorical strategy. In particular, I pointed out that the Uglies series has many of the same issues that Jackson Pearce’s Sisters Red was delisted for. But the BitchMedia staffers didn’t apply those criteria to Uglies, because they only applied those criteria to books mentioned in the first twenty or so comments to their original blog post. In other words, I was pointing out the craptasticness of their editorial process, in which the fastest and most vitriolic commenters are granted special powers over the books they dislike. (Just like in, you know, libraries.)
Q: So your request to delist Uglies is merely a symbolic gesture?
A: The list is itself symbolic. It wasn’t an award that came with money or superpowers, and it’s made of symbols (letters and punctuation marks). As I said, this is a set of communications, and asking to be taken off the list was a communication strategy. Symbolic is not a bad thing, it’s just what it is.
Q: But you haven’t been taken off the list. So your strategy failed!
A: Not if more people have been drawn to the discussion thanks to the rhetorical forcefulness of my (and others’) requests to be taken off the list. That was the actual point of the request, and it seems to have worked.
Q: But wait, you said that the folks at BitchMedia hadn’t read all the books in the list. So it wasn’t that illegitimate anyway, right?
A: They got recommendations from people who they believed to be experts in some way, and the results seemed pretty awesome to me and to many others. The folks who zipped through the challenged books over the weekend were staffers, who didn’t bother to get back to the people who recommended the books in the first place. In other words, a small ad hoc committee was convened and rushed a decision out in response to a tiny minority of complainers. This is the dynamic of small-town library challenges, and we expected better of BitchMedia.
Q: But didn’t asking to be taken off this list make you look over dramatic?
A: “Overdramatic” is one word, so I win this entire argument.
Look, this stuff happens all the time in YA lit. People come in and comment with varying degrees of expertise, odd and snarky assumptions about what it is to be a teen, and randomly assigned power (like politicians commenting on texts for teenagers written forty years after they were teens), and that annoys us.
Q: What I really meant was, you’re just stirring this up for money, right?
If you think that this controversy will materially increase my sales (or the sales of any of the other authors involved), you are confused about the relative scales of those things.
Q: You really think you’re awesome, don’t you, Scott?
A: I’ve had librarians scream when they see me. So yeah. Also I’ve read one of the books in question, unlike most people in the conversation.
But more important, I’ve had decades of experience as a teacher, textbook editor, and YA writer, in which I’ve seen various flavors of control over teen books exercised by parents, teachers, politicians, other teens, and concern trolls. I’ve corresponded with and met thousands of teenagers and talked about what and how they read, and have worked for twenty years in an industry in which lists of books are compiled, argued about, and in which they make a big difference. In other words, the authors in this fight are acting from long and deep sets of experiences, and we will be fighting this fight as part of our day jobs while many others moved on to the next Internet fisticuffs. Trivializing artists involved in a these kinds of fights as self-aggrandizing is one of the oldest tricks in the book, like saying “Oh, you’ll just sell more copies, so you must be LOVING THIS.” It is a way of avoiding the much more gnarly and unpleasant issues involved.
In other words, the possibility that I’m being a pompous git for asking that my books be removed from the list doesn’t make BitchMedia’s behavior any better, or the parallels between this event and library challenges any less unsettling.
Q: But if they put the challenged books back on the list, wouldn’t they just be caving again? This time to a bigger (and better connected) group of bullies?
A: I think they should go back to their original recommenders of these challenged books and have a real discussion, not one that takes place over a weekend with “a couple of us at the office.” And if they’ve added new criteria based on a few commenters who simply got there first, why not take down the whole list and look at everything from the beginning in light of the many, many comments and concerns up there now?
Q: Um, because they’re not the Printz Committee and don’t have time?
A: Well, then maybe they could simply ask the members of the Printz Committee why one of the books they delisted, Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels, was a Printz honoree. (SNAP!)
Q: But BitchMedia isn’t saying these are bad books, just that they are inappropriate for this list!
A: It’s not the exact adjective that matters here, but the process. Again, these books were singled out and subjected to an ad hoc first reading because of a few plaintive commenters. This is not the way to do things.
Seriously, even if those two office staffers had read everything in the list again that weekend, wouldn’t it still have the appearance of impropriety?
Q: This whole kerfuffle is really not that important. Why are you making such a big deal out of it?
A: If it’s not that important, why did you read this far? Why aren’t you off on some other blog fixing Egypt?
Q: But what if BitchMedia doesn’t want to ever do anything about YA lit again because you were mean to them?
A: If they cut and run because that seems too hard, they will not be missed.
But I suspect that they’ll think long and hard about how they approach YA in the future, and will do a better job. They’ve done countless cool things for the last fifteen years, and that’s why we authors got so riled up. We remonstrate because we love.
Also, check out Margo Lanagan’s excellent post on this matter.
As you can see, my website has had its first makeover in many years. This is to celebrate the fact that my first new series in years, Leviathan, comes out this autumn. (October 6, to be exact.)
Things may be wonky for a while as we play around under the hood. But I hope you enjoy the new look. Let me know what you think!
Click here to contact Scott Westerfeld.
Jill Grinberg
Jill Grinberg Literary Management
info@grinbergliterary.com
