All of the physical copies will be shipping next week. If you haven’t put in your order yet, then do so today!

And mark your calendars! The launch party is on June 14th at the Old Bank Hotel in Oxford, England. There’ll be a US launch party in the fall.

When beginning a novel there is so much the author does not know. As my first novel, A Secret Woman, evolved — and it has changed in some radical ways since its early drafts — various plot elements came and went, various characters vanished or appeared, while others grew or decreased in importance. But I did know one thing quite clearly from the start: this was not a novel about a woman’s search for the right romantic partner. The story of Louise Terry, the heroine of the book, would not end in marriage.

From Henry James to Charles Frazier, from Charlotte Bronte to Christina Bartolomeo, many an author has shaped a novel’s narrative arc to resolve itself with the union of two lovers. Don’t get me wrong, I admire all of the authors I’ve mentioned here. Indeed, Bronte’s Jane Eyre is, in fact, my ur-novel; I’d be a very different woman, and a different writer, if I hadn’t fallen in love with Jane, her courage, her passionate intelligence, her mystical sense of self-preservation, when, at the age of eleven, I first read that book. But the famous opening sentence of that book’s last chapter, “Reader, I married him,” gratifying though it is, was not what I had in mind for Louise Terry.

Louise, of course, brought a mind of her own to this novel business, and the journey she took me on was full of surprises. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was how hard it was to let her go. Toward the end of my last final major edit, I realized that I was dragging my heels a bit, and doing so because I was going to miss her. We’d spent a lot of lovely, difficult, intimate time together. I was thrilled when co-publisher Andrew Gifford, of the Santa Fe Writers Project, told me he had fallen a little in love with Louise. I think I did, too.

And who knows? Maybe one day she’ll come back to me with another adventure to relate, another story to tell. But for now, it’s time to send her out into the world — still single, and very much her own.

Amazon Kicks Independent Presses From Its Kindle Store!
Here We Go Again, an American Industry Shoots Itself In the…

So, Amazon wants a bigger piece of the Indie pie? First of all, Big Presses are pissed at Amazon because it’s Amazon who sets the price of a Press’s Kindle-ization of a book, not the publisher. . .That, in and of itself, is odd. What makes it doubly bad for publishers, large and small, is that the customer who buys a book, be it print or e-book, is construed as an Amazon customer, NOT a customer of the publisher. So, if you buy a book on Amazon, the publisher has no way of reaching you and bringing you into its family of customers. That is a fight that publishers, large and small, should take on. Repeat business is a lifeblood, and Amazon denies that to its suppliers, the publishers.

There’s a second battle however, which is always being waged in this era of American Giant Corporatism, and I can’t help but believe that it is this second battle, the one between Big and Small, that is responsible for this current controversy. Amazon isn’t kicking Indie presses to the curb because Amazon needs more money, or that the Indies somehow have the upper hand. If they needed more money, Amazon could simply take ten cents more from every sale and their profits would soar even higher than they are. No, this has got to do with the sickening notion in the Unregulated Corporate Monopoly System that says there’s no room – no room at all – for the little guys. How are Amazon, and the giant publishing houses, NOT partnered in this?

If business men and women (face it, mostly men) really believed the garbage they peddle about “entrepreneurialism,” (which they despise because it requires actual “competition,” which is anathema to big business) they would understand that the small business, one that would find 10,000 sales and above just fine, basically constitutes the Research & Development arm of their respective industries. And they get it for nothing.

The corporate model denies this. Their illogical system says that, with all the units they must sell to make a BIG profit, any customer who is able to buy from a small independent is somehow depriving them of market share that is rightfully, somehow, theirs.

The key word here is BIG.

Big beats small. Every time. What I’ve always found troubling is why big business doesn’t encourage small?

But the truth of the matter is that rather than plumb the field of small presses for product that might have some jump, what actually happens is that huge companies put their legal engines in gear and drive the smaller guys out of business. Independent book retailers and publishers, they believe, wrongly, are stealing their customers. They don’t understand that, when they destroy these businesses, the quality of their own product then goes flat, becomes uncompetitive, even with itself, and they topple, taking entire support industries with them.

It’s happened before, too many times to count, and it’s happening now. Whenever you hear a businessperson begin a sentence with “What people really want is…” you know their industry is doomed.

The collapse of the Recording Industry is a good case in point. Don’t believe that crap about iTunes and pirated recordings taking them down, they were already gone.

The record industry collapsed because no big label would take on an act selling fewer than a million units. I wonder how many artists right now are getting turned down because the labels are all hunting for the “Next Adele!” Just like writers now are being kicked aside while the big publishing houses piss themselves waiting for the “Next Harry Potter” the “Next Da Vinci Code!” We’ve all heard it, ad nauseum! Why? Because record companies and their brethren in book publishing are greedy, stupid, and lazy. Getting out and moving product is hard work. You have to have reps in the field who knock on doors, visit retailers, offer incentives, check on product placement, and who constantly revamp publicity and sales materials, work the media, etc. You must also develop a you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours relationship with retailers and suppliers. It’s how you sell toothpaste. Books and recordings are really no different. And although profit margins are never huge, nor should they be, after all, books and recordings are small retail items, but there should be enough money to go around for everyone to be happy.

It’s much easier, and a lot more fun, however, to have a jillion seller that everyone can identify with, catch their coat tails, and ride the wave. Then you can get college girls to snort coke off your weenie and call in late for work in the morning. (Don’t you dare edit that last part out, believe me, it’s huge motivator in both the recording and publishing businesses.)

We all fell in love with Kindle. I did. But now, thinking about it, it should have gone the way of the Beta Max. When Amazon maneuvered into a position of exclusivity, like Sony did with the Beta Max video recorder way back when, alarms should have gone off all over the industry, and the VHS version of the Kindle, one that could accommodate all formats, and every kind of content, should have taken them to court, won, and put them under.

That’s regulated, free market capitalism, and it doesn’t exist anymore. Because what we have now is unregulated monopoly capitalism.

Fuck’m.
Do it anyway.
You heard it here.
JJP

Art Jericho is a groovy little gallery nestled in among some old buildings just off trendy Walton Street in the Jericho section of Oxford, England. The current show by a young painter named William Cotterill is a captivating step through a dimensional seam where the ancient landscape shows the brief scratches and misty remnants of human passage. Each one of these two dozen or so pieces wants to tell you that something happened here – not something necessarily bad or good, or even pleasant, but something. Railway ties in the dusky damp, a cluster of trees too sturdy to succumb, buildings obscured by the very atmosphere of place. Maybe it was the wintery night itself, but something about these paintings made me glad to be wearing a cozy sweater, a woolen overcoat, a hat.

But it wasn’t William Cotterill’s show, aptly titled, “A Tangle Of Matter & Ghost” that brought Rose Solari and I to the Art Jericho Gallery recently. It was a gathering of talented writers who call themselves The Back Room Poets who were celebrating the publication of several new chapbooks by some of their members that had us crunching through the Oxford snow, temporarily bypassing the many fabulous pubs that dot the neighborhood of Jericho, to hear these voices, mirthful, intrepid, and real.

“You can’t swing a cat in this burgh without hitting a poet or writer of some sorts,” I laughed with a small band of renegade geniuses from the reading who had adjourned to the Harcourt Arms Pub after the reading.

A couple of weeks earlier we had attended a different kind of poetry event at the Kellogg College of Oxford University, where former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion had gently and elegantly put two students through their paces, critiquing their work publicly before a very discerning gathering of heavy hitters, that included, among others, Clare Morgan, Phillip Hollman, Jane Draycott, and Jon Stallworthy. Yikes! I was glad it wasn’t me up there, but it was sure fun watching someone else running the gauntlet!

But at the Art Jericho gallery, the Backroom Poets were displaying their wares, as lovely and thought-provoking as Cotterill’s paintings on the white brick walls. Mark Leetch read from his new work called Chang’ an Poems, all of a sequence. These reminded me somewhat of Henry Miller’s concept of “Walking Up And Down In China,” where the artist creates an imaginary landscape wherein to house his or her very real impressions and illuminations felt and imprinted on his or her tender and oh so vulnerable soul.

David Olson, a local maven for the poetically inclined, read from his New World Elegies, still able to find a sublime humor in his loving lamentations.

At the Harcourt Arms we were joined by Andrew Smardon, another poet who had been lurking about at the reading and proved an amiable pint-sipping addition to our little gaggle of poetry enthusiasts. I like hanging out with poets. They have the capacity for slipping between the worlds of the sublime and the ridiculous mid-sentence, and, of course, tipping back the pints and wine in shameless celebration of it all!

Cheers!

Jimmy