Dear readers,

Welcome behind the scenes! ForeWord has offered me the opportunity to blog this month about the publishing world from the view inside a literary agency. Enjoy! If you post comments here, I will do my best to respond to any questions that may come up.
 
I am the assistant (also known as “the reader”) at Nelson Literary Agency (www.nelsonagency.com). We are actively acquiring clients who write science fiction, fantasy, romance, young adult, middle grade, commercial fiction, literary fiction and memoir. As most of you probably know, a literary agent works with a writer in order to sell their manuscript to a publishing house.
 
So, if you are a writer interested in being published, you may be hunting for an agent. And, how do you attract the attention of an agent? With an outstanding query letter!!!  A query letter includes a brief bio and a short description of your work. Nelson Literary Agency receives 100 or so submissions a day (35,000 query letters in 2007). My job is to read them all, send out the standard rejection letter for those that don’t fit our agency, and ask for sample pages (the first 30 pages of the work) for those query letters that pique our interest. Sounds like fun, huh?
 
In my experience, the query letter accurately represents  the quality of a manuscript. That’s how important it is. The question writers tend to ask me is, “What are you looking for? How can I make my query letter better?” Here are some answers:
1)    DO YOUR RESEARCH! Before you send your query letter make sure you understand the submission guidelines for any agency to which you would like to submit! The vast majority of rejection letters I send out go to writers that didn’t read our website and are submitting incorrect information. For example, we accept only email queries, but some agencies want snail mail, and some agencies want synopses instead of queries, and some want the first 100 pages of the book, etc.

2)    Get a good grasp of the genre of your work. Is your work a sexy regency historical romance or a paranormal young adult fantasy? You don’t have to be able to rattle off all the genres and subgenres out there, but you should know in general where your work falls. If you feel like you need direction, here’s a suggestion: walk into a bookstore and look around. Would you think to find your book on the shelves marked “fantasy” or “mystery” or “horror” or “romance.” That’s a good place to start. If it really isn’t that easy, try this, “My book is a completed work of fiction.” That’s enough for me! The trouble is that many, many query letters I read are for self-help books, or picture books, or spy novels. We don’t represent works in any of these genres. Of course, this goes back to point number one, which is read the submission guidelines before sending in your work. But also – know your genre!

3)    Make sure your work is completed – really completed. You query letter should read like this, “I have a COMPLETED work of fantasy” or “I’d like to submit my FINISHED 100,000 word romance novel.” If interested in your query letter, my first step is to request the first 30 pages of your work. It can be very frustrating to request a work and have someone email back, “well, it’s only in it’s first draft, can I check back with you when I’m finished?” I will have gone through tens of thousands of other submissions by then and my energy will be focused on someone else. Of course, we accept works that need editing, but in general edit, polish and double check your work before starting your agent hunt.

4)    Remember to include the title of your work, your contact information (especially your email address), and your name. These are little details that help us and make your query letter more professional.

5)    The meat of your query letter should be a paragraph (or two) which we call “the pitch.” It should sound exactly like the back cover of a novel – short, exciting, engaging, descriptive. To repeat the instructions above, we don’t want a synopsis (although some agencies do), and we don’t want character profiles or chapter titles, or plot points. If you want good practice at this, pick up some of the novels in your house (or at the bookstore again) and read the back cover. Then, try to copy the energy, the focus and the length of that type of paragraph and that is exactly what I am looking for.

6)    This may seem obvious, but remember to make your query letter short. Your bio can take up a paragraph and your pitch can take up a paragraph or so. And, that’s about it. Remember that I see about a hundred of these a day, so the more professional and concise the better chance that I will ask for sample pages.

7)    Despite the fact that I just said to make it short, I do want to see details. A sentence like this is powerful: “The hero and heroine don’t realize the king has hired them to defeat a slobbering were-bear when they accept a simple call to arms at the castle.” A sentence like this is not: “The hero and heroine have many adventures.”

8)    Finally, avoid reviewing your work. This is another way of reiterating that the pitch should sound like the back cover of a book. But, sentences like this do not help promote your work, “my writing is fast and exciting,” or “this book is geared toward teenage girls,” or “the voice of the hero is authentic.” Describe your work, don’t review it.

9)    As an added bonus, here are some helpful websites for more information on query letters and the query process:

Pubrants.blogspot.com  - (Kristin’s publishing blog. She has posted the original query letters for many of our clients – talk about a great resource!)

Evileditor.blogspot.com  - (an editor posts query letters, reviews them, comments and makes changes. See the evaluation process as it happens!)

www.writers.net  -  a great online resource for writers including feedback on query letters

Posted by: Sara Megibow

In the seven years since I published my first humor book, Carpool Tunnel Syndrome, I've spent an insane amount of time just trying to market myself. I'm glad I didn't keep track of the time, since I think I'd  cry if I knew how much of my life's energy has gone into the endeavor. The Internet has made it both easier and more difficult to market yourself: there are endless web sites and blogs to contact, endless online zines on which to try to get yourself reviewed or published. And the Internet rat race just gets worse and worse, as marketing "experts" tell you you're nowhere if you aren't active on Facebook, YouTube, and Twittering all day long (but I am on Facebook, and I'm LinkedIn too). I often get tired of asking the world to pay attention to me. As fascinating as I am, even I get tired of myself.

I have spent thousands of dollars on outside PR help but my biggest impressive successes have been through my own efforts or, in the case of getting a quote from my book on the Starbucks cups, through plain luck. Paid PR help has gotten me quoted in the media several times, but nothing has caused any sustained momentum. Things that have helped have been subscribing to several book marketing and PR expert newsletters, keeping up membership in a professional online writers' forum, where I always look for news about potential outlets for my work, and look for reporters doing stories on topics I can comment on, with a funny angle.

Things would have been a lot easier if I were an expert on investing, losing weight, budget travel deals, or something similar. But it's hard to market yourself as an expert when you spend your days trying to write funny stories about the latest rodent infestations, or why bad contractors happen to good people. On the other hand, I'm too far gone to stop now.

I've also learned that you have to keep searching for your audience, the people who will relate to your voice. For years, I avoided marketing my work to Jewish publications, even though I’m Jewish, since I didn’t want to limit my audience, nor did I want to be pegged as solely a “Jewish writer.” But over time, editors of Jewish publications and web sites started coming to me – they had heard my voice and recognized it in the pieces I had sold to them. In the past two years, I’ve become a regular humor columnist for an two Jewish print magazines, the “Jewlarious” section of the web site aish.com, and started podcasting my program, "Just Off My Noodle," on the web site of a national Jewish organization. I no longer shy away from writing about this aspect of my life, as it actually widens my audience, and I can almost always adapt my work written for these outlets into more generic humor, such as for my blog on MommaSaid.net, for my email newsletter subscribers, and other media outlets.

In the past few years, I've also sold pieces to the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, Beliefnet.com, and the Los Angeles Times. Earlier, I sold humor to Woman's Day, Family Circle and Ladies' Home Journal, but these magazines have closed the door on humor, at least for now. I really don't get their reasoning. They insist that they are all about "service" articles, but if you ask me, making people laugh in a troubled world is one of the best services you can offer. If only they saw it my way!

Motivational sales people always say that "no" doesn't really mean "no," it means "not yet." I've used that gambit to follow up repeatedly with editors who have ignored me, because you just never know when something may change. I even plan to contact some of the editors at these women's magazines who have published me before to pitch myself again, adding my shiny new awards to my email sig line. After all, magazines are always retooling, and maybe I'll reach them just at the moment they are scratching their heads, thinking, "Where can we find a terrific writer who can make rodent infestations funny?" And I'll be right there!

If you write for a limited market, you absolutely must love what you do and love your topic. (Keep your day job, too.) If you aren’t getting pleasure from your work, rethink your writing emphasis. Finally, persevere and carry a thick skin. If you’ve been at this for more than 15 minutes you know editors will ignore you more often than they'll pay attention, but if you keep polishing your work and continue hunting for new, like-minded audiences, you can and will break through. It may take a while, though, so stay optimistic, be persistent, and above all, keep your sense of humor.
   

Posted by: Judy Gruen

After my first two publishing disasters, I was in no hurry to publish a third book, but it remained a longer-term goal. In the meantime, I worked on “building my platform” and refining my humor writing skills, taking them as uproariously high as possible. (I don't know why, but I fantasized about one day having a reviewer call my work “trenchant.”) I had already been sending out twice-monthly humor columns, called “Off My Noodle,” to email subscribers for a few years, which were also posted on my web site, www.judygruen.com. While no one was paying for the subscription, I rarely missed my self-imposed deadlines. I tried to sell the columns afterward, but I have weaned myself off that habit: now I only write original material for my regular paying gigs, and then adapt the columns for my email subscribers. After all, my editors want original material, not “reprints.”

After a few years, I had amassed enough Noodles (high-humor, zero carbs!) to fill another book, even after weeding out the weaker or dated material. But if selling humor is a hard sell, selling a collection of humor columns is doubly so, since I was not David Sedaris or Dave Barry. I briefly thought of changing my name to “Dave,” but feared it would confuse my friends and family. Yet I knew I would buck the odds again. True, I had shown appalling taste in publishers so far, but my persistence created undeniable momentum in my career: My first two books had won awards from the publishing industry, I still had the bragging rights over the other PR and sales successes, which I had achieved on my own. I also had begun speaking on occasion—something I knew I needed to develop as a tool to drive book sales. I was selling my work consistently to a variety of media outlets.

With hope triumphing over experience (again), I spent months re-editing the columns I chose for the book, organizing them into themed sections. It was a point of pride with me that I did not just toss everything together that I had ever sent out and slap it between two covers. This collection of what I considered my “best of, so far” became The Women's Daily Irony Supplement (which earned the Gold Award from ForeWord Magazine in the humor category for 2007).

I found an agent who loved the manuscript and shopped it around for many months, starting at the top of the publishing food chain. The reactions fell into three categories: I was very funny but my platform wasn't big enough, my platform was great but I wasn't that funny, or they already had another woman humorist in their list. After more than a dozen rejections we had to conclude that I was again looking at very small indie houses or self-publishing. I appreciated my agent's hard work, and we parted on good terms.

I took several more months before deciding what to do, because I figured if I made a third stupid mistake I'd have to kill myself, and if I did that, who would take the kids to the orthodontist? (Either that, or I could write a little memoir called, Smart Women, Foolish Publishing Choices. But who would publish that?) I emphatically did not want to go POD, yet it seemed like my only option. I settled on one POD company whose references checked out, but I still felt that POD still had too many strikes against it, and couldn't bring myself to sign the contract. One day, almost in desperation, I picked up a magazine from a consortium of indie publishers that had been collecting dust on my desk for weeks. I called the organization and asked if they could think of any member publishers who might take an interest in me. They suggested I contact Beagle Bay Books, and since I had nothing to lose, and my dog is half-beagle, I sent them an email. Jacqueline Simonds wrote back right away, which made me momentarily suspicious: if she's such a great publisher, why is she paying attention to me? I had fallen into the mindset of Groucho Marx's joke: “I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

I shook off my concerns (after all, not only did the Simonds have a beagle, but his name was Bertie, which I knew was from P.J. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster series, which told me they appreciated literate humor. Such are the weird idiosyncrasies that form a person's decision-making.) I emailed several of their authors for references, and found only universal praise for the Simonds. Shortly after, I signed with Beagle Bay, who published The Women's Daily Irony Supplement under their Creative Minds imprint in April 2007.

Working with Beagle Bay has been a total pleasure. Finally, I was working with reliable and honest professionals who I knew had my best interests at heart. We, too, have been mystified by the failure of another PR coup—I had a quote from my book on more than 5 million Starbucks cups—to spur sales, but together we have worked to move the book forward and to help it find its rightfully larger audience. The Women's Daily Irony Supplement has also scored many publishing awards, and Jacqueline and I tried to capitalize on that by writing a funny press release called Humor Writer Achieves “Athlete's Feat”, tying it into the Summer Olympics.

I'm convinced that much of the difficulty in breaking through to a larger audience is due to the rapidly changing media environment and the drastically lessened space in newspapers and magazines for the kind of slice-of-life humor that I write. That, and the fact that I don't have my own prime-time television program. In my final blog installment, I'll write about what I've learned works, and what doesn't, in trying to promote myself in a tough niche.

Posted by: Judy Gruen

I meet another writer online whose first book is about to be published by a small house. We have an immediate rapport, and I tell her my tale of woe about my publishing disaster. She offers to tell her publisher about me. Who knows what might happen?

Here's what happened: I am about to make an even more colossal, much more costly mistake than I made by entering into a "Hey, kids! Let's make a Broadway show!" agreement with my graphic designer friend. Good thing I went to college and grad school to make me so smart.

My new writer friend connects me with her publisher, whom I will call "Bellatrix Lestrange."  Lestrange is young (too young, I wonder?), enthusiastic, has nearly a dozen titles in circulation, talks a good game, is impressed with what I achieved in PR and sales on my own. She sees I'm a hard worker, and sends a contract with a lot of bad clauses in it. I hire an agent to look at it for me, and while I get some of the bad clauses excised, I lose the most important battles.

Eager to get Carpool back in circulation, I sign the contract, give her the book for no advance whatsoever and agree to write a second book for her, also with no advance. Well, after all, publishing advances are getting smaller and smaller. If my books do well, I'll make it up on the other side, right?

In the meanwhile, my friend's book is published, riddled with errors. I worry, as Lestrange now controls the future of Carpool and my next book also. In fact, it takes me four attempts to get them to fix the typos and other mistakes that I had found in the page proofs of my second book, Till We Eat Again: Confessions of a Diet Dropout, including mistakes that were added by Lestrange's mother, who with zero qualifications whatsoever "edits" my book.

When I open the first box of Till We Eat Again, a book I loved working on and was excited beyond belief to finally see, I feel physically ill: it looks like it was produced on a 1985 dot matrix printer. I have visions of my book launch party and already feel embarrassed at taking people's money for this shabbily printed book. I hide my dismay as best I can.

The "royalty" statements are also suspiciously complicated, with columns and columns of confusing numbers. It seemed designed to obfuscate, and after hours of pouring over them, I discover dubious accounting practices, such as double-billing me for returns and weird overhead charges. I ask for clarification on the statements, but wouldn't you know it? The "accountant" is always out of town!  

Things go from bad to worse. I compare notes with other authors similarly shackled to the same publisher, and we all come to the inescapable conclusion that Lestrange has taken us all for a ride. Several of us even fly halfway across the country to appear at a legal proceeding against her brought by one of the authors. Many thousands of dollars later, I ransom my books via an intellectual property attorney, the same books that I had given away for free. It's hard to admit all my dumb mistakes publicly, but if it helps someone else be more careful, to do more homework, I'll be glad.

This was a painful way to learn that it was not enough to have met an author thrilled with her publisher when the author-publisher relationship was so new. I have since cautioned every would-be author who asks me for advice to get several references from authors who have at least a year-long relationship with a publisher before signing a contract. There is too much on the line, too much a publisher needs to show they can deliver professionally over a sustained period, before you can safely assume you're dealing with a pro.  

Now I had two books OOP, but both books had won awards for humor, I began to be invited to speak at conferences, and my fan base was growing. Like an addict, I couldn't stop myself from thinking about a third book. Good thing I have a sense of humor.
    

Posted by: Judy Gruen

Seven years ago, in a moment that was either inspired or crazy (or both) I decided to write a humor book called Carpool Tunnel Syndrome: Motherhood as Shuttle Diplomacy. I had already worked as a writer and editor for several years, had a graduate degree in journalism, and had many author friends, so this idea wasn't quite as ludicrous as it might have been if I were, say, an actuary for an insurance company. Since I knew something about book publishing already, it made my idea merely meshugena.

Still, as an unknown writer, I knew my chances of landing an agent and contract with a reputable publishing house were slim. So, trying to save time and aggravation (that was the idea, anyway) I decided to self-publish. Knowing I lacked the skills to handle all the functions of a publisher, I researched publishers that offered self-publishing services. One man at the publishing house I almost (and should have) signed with was saint-like in his patience for my endless questions during numerous phone calls.

This brings me to my favorite line from the movie "Terms of Endearment," when Jack Nicholson, who plays a retired astronaut romantically involved with Shirley MacLaine, keeps trying to make a break from MacLaine, who is clinging to him needfully. Just when he thinks he can bolt, MacLaine latches on again. Nicholson, in classic tone, says, "Just seconds from a clean getaway."

And so there I was, ready to write the publisher a big check and get my book project moving,  when a friend about to self-publish her husband's book invited me to publish my book under her new imprint. She had read John Kremer, she had bought a block of ISBNs, she was applying to B&T and Ingrahm for distro agreements, and she was an outstanding graphic designer who I knew could ably handle the book design.

"Why not?" she said. "I know you could save a lot of money if we do it together."

And so, like Nicholson, just seconds from a clean getaway, I signed an agreement with my friend that we cobbled together as best we could. This was a big mistake. I ignored my misgivings, such as that my friend had a controlling personality that I knew could make her difficult to work with, and that despite my research, which included calling publishing attorneys, no one had ever heard of this kind of publishing partnership and could offer no advice about how to structure the contract. Our agreement spelled out our respective responsibilities as we could foresee them. But of course, certain things were not foreseeable, such as my friend's marriage dissolving, her life becoming so tumultuous that she could no longer keep up her end of the bargain, and the worst: her deciding to yank her (ex)husband's book from circulation, ending her imprint, and therefore forcing me to declare my own, precious first book OOP when it was barely getting its sea legs.

This was devastating. I had devoted more than six months to just marketing the book, networking with every Mom-related web site in the universe, sending out review copies, contacting magazines, a maniacal one-woman marketing machine. And she was the one who convinced me to publish with her! 

Despite this, we had three successes: Radio shrink Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who had more than 20 million listeners back then, plugged the book on her show and offered it as a giveaway to "the first five callers" who called our toll-free number. (No one on her staff told us that our phone would start ringing at 6 a.m. and go through the night, by "first callers" who listened to the show in every time zone imaginable.) I also sold an excerpt to Woman's Day (circulation 6.2 million at that time), and they also put in our toll-free number to order.

Dr. Laura's plug pushed the book sky-high on Amazon . . . for about two days, after which it settled back down to humble territory. I was bewildered that the Woman's Day excerpt did almost nothing for sales that we could see, until I realized that a magazine whose every issue hawks "20 ways to save money" (my excerpt was about saving money, too) was a magazine whose readers waited for their books at the library. 

The third, and most substantial success, was my selling 2,500 copies of Carpool to Scholastic Book Fairs. This was a huge achievement, though a logistical pain (25 copies to this location; 87 to this location, etc), but at least I made a little money.

When I was forced to declare Carpool OOP, we hired a legal mediator to untangle our partnership, simple as it was. While my partner's troubles were far worse, I still felt I had gotten a raw deal. Thinking about what might have been with the other publisher was useless, but I wasn't ready to remainder my book to a small sad blip in publishing history. Tune in next week to find out what happened next!

(By the way, if you'd like to order a copy of Carpool Tunnel Syndrome, please order it from my web site, www.judygruen.com. Remember, it's OOP!)

Posted by: Judy Gruen

It is hard to talk about publishing without, well, talking about authors. After all, without them... Seriously, while I wouldn't say that today's authors have it rougher than their predecessors (indoor plumbing! soft, comfy pajamas! TiVo!), when your entire industry undergoes a sea change, you can't help but be affected. To my mind, the biggest challenge facing today's author is rising above the noise.

Think about how many books are published each year—300,000 and counting, if I recall correctly. Add in the books published last year. And the year before. And so on. Plus the classics and perennials, and you being to wonder how anyone ever catches the attention of a reader.

According to Publishers Weekly, they reviewed about 6,000 of those releases last year. That's a whole lot of reviewing, but it's not near enough to get the word out. And, as we know, newspaper review space is rapidly dwindling. This puts additional burden on authors to get the word out while remaining true to the work.

It's hard.

Today's readers expect more from authors...as do today's publishers. Let's focus on the former first. As the demand for "authenticity" increases, so does the desire to erase the boundaries between author and person. Once, authors were people of mystery, we didn't really know who they were, just that they created. Now, it seems to be a rule of celebrity (and as authors do publicity, they become celebrities of sorts) that it all hangs out. This is uncomfortable on a lot of levels.

Here is the funny thing: I don't want to know about the personal lives of authors. Generally, my relationship with them comes through their fiction. Real lives are so often, well, meh. I mean, it sort of taints the reading experience to know that the author is dull and tedious in real life.

Or petulant. Or paranoid. Or insecure. Or any of the traits that makes us human.

This is the fine line that authors must walk: maintaining enough mystery to keep their readers from confusing fact with fiction while using social networking tools to maintain open lines of communication and build audiences. My feeling is that most of us are pretty boring, and describing our daily activities doesn't help generate interest. Very few people have the talent—and the lives—to write personal blogs that sustain reader interest.

But you have to keep your name out there, make sure they remember you between books, sustain interest while enticing new readers.
 
Oh, and just to make it that much tougher, this must be done in conjunction with building a broad, effective social network. Depending on who you are and what you write, this network ranges from a basic email list to a personalized social system with features that rival the best of Facebook. It means that the modern author must—and I do mean must, not might or should—spend precious time maintaining the author brand.

The burden of doing this and more rests firmly on the shoulders of the individual author. Your publisher simply doesn't have the resources to lavish dollars and staff on maintaining the author publicity machine. Very few authors get the red carpet marketing treatment. And while publishers are offering increased online opportunities, the publishers also own the readers reached via their efforts (hint: if you have a good agent and your publisher is collecting names and email addresses, make 'em share). Just as you won't want to cede control of your list to Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network, you don't want to cede control of your information to your publisher.

Let me say that again because I actually heard an industry expert suggest, with a straight face, that authors shouldn't worry about such archaic notions as websites. "Just keep it all on Facebook," he said.

No. A million times no. Do. Not. Keep. It. All. On. Facebook.

Not if you cherish your author brand. If you're cool with carefully building a network only to have it dismantled when the service disappears or glitches—and I can guarantee that a system will glitch at that moment when you need it the most because that's how Murphy's Law works—and if you're cool with rebuilding your network from scratch, then sure, let someone else own your data. I mean, it's just your career. Why not trust it to a system created by a couple of near-college graduates who had a cool idea and lousy security (no real services insulted here)?

Sorry, I digressed. Back on topic. Just had to get that out. Today's authors are competing on a level their foreauthors could not have envisioned. Competition for time and energy is fierce, both from other forms of entertainment and from within your own industry. Conventional wisdom suggests that the window for capturing reader interest is very short—a week or two after a book's release, maybe additional time if you go through multiple formats—in order to meet sales expectations.

The care and feeding of a career starts long before that book hits the shelf and continues long after that book is past the window allowed by said conventional wisdom. This branding effort (and, yes, you are a brand and you want your brand to succeed more than anyone else on the planet) takes time, energy, and strategy. You aren't just publicizing a book...you're building a social network that extends beyond traditional shelf life.

It's sometimes too easy to spill your guts and overshare when it comes to building a relationship with your fans, your readers. It's a tough line that authors walk as they hone the tools needed to maintain these reader ties while remaining true to the work. I can't tell you how to find the necessary balance to do it all and to do it well. That you'll need to figure out for yourself.

But I can tell you that the socially networked author you need to become will be easier to face if that author isn't the person you see when you brush your teeth every morning. I see the former as a character in your repertoire, someone you put on when working the marketing side of your brain.

I see the latter as someone your public doesn't need to meet, doesn't need to know.

Posted by: Kassia Krozser

Last week, my final thoughts were about community. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said, "Absolutely, reading is a solitary activity. Just me and my book. And maybe a glass of wine." Today, as I'm thinking about reading, I'm realizing that it's not the "me" activity one would imagine.

When I was in the third grade, my teacher would read us a chapter from a book every day. My favorite was Island of the Blue Dolphins. The entire story played out miles from my home—I could see the island from the highway. My mom, the librarian, read to the family during dinner. My favorites from her were the King Arthur stories. Man, I have a weak spot for knights in shining armor.

For a few years, my husband and I had this thing where we'd play the audio version of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash while on road trips (we don't take many and it's a long book). We'd both read this one separately, of course—how can you be an early Internet geek without a little Stephenson on your reading resume?—but it was just as much fun to hear it together. We'd listen, we'd pause, we'd discuss, we'd remember.

Back when it was first released, we were also playing online with friends in San Francisco. Nobody did anything but play in those days. This was when a graphic, web-browsery thing called NetCruiser was all the rage. Back when it was the height of cool to play chess via email. Back when you could see what was new on the Internet—the entire Internet—and still have time to experiment with the early version of chat.

And we talked about books with those friends. Talked about Snow Crash. Wow, we thought, imagine a virtual world. If you've been to Second Life, you're thinking, "Maybe next virtual world." But no matter, it's a book that came to life. Imagine that...someone imagined a reality, and then someone made that imagination real.

Fast forward to 2008. I've been a member of my book club for about ten years. I'm one of the newer members, though not the newest. I joined after they'd done the Jane Austens and some Russians (saving, however, The Brothers Karamazov for me). That was when we had the "old" list. We've integrated a new list because there were titles on the old list that nobody wanted to read, though a few die-hards insist we have to give it a shot. So once a month, we get together to talk about one book, though we talk about a lot more (there's a reason it's also known as "wine club").

Think about it. You read, however you read. I know people who, for various reasons, are audiobook-only readers. I know people who are blind readers. I know people who read slowly, excrutiatingly slow for someone like me. I know people who rival me in speed (I can't help it, even when I want to linger...). The one thing we all have in common is that reading is just part of the experience.

The best often comes when we talk about the story, the words, the vision, the ideas. Every person comes away from the book with something different. No two people have the same experience when they read a book. It's all about putting impressions together. Books, and I'm talking fiction in particular, are about community. We read, but that's only a piece of the experience. Our relationship with a book doesn't end when we read the final sentence. For some of us, our relationship with certain books never ends at all. And we want to share our thoughts about that book with everyone we meet.

A lot of people worry about the future of the novel. I don't. I do worry about the business of publishing because the industry depends on ad hoc groups to build community and sustain community and maintain the passion necessary to keep the world excited about book—and I'm going to tell you, the kind of community that this industry needs requires more resources (yeah, that's code for money) than the current business model permits.

We live in this crazy new world that throws old rules over for new rules without a passing thought. Old rules in the book biz were top down, you told me what I wanted to read. Now I'm telling you what I want to read—I want dialogue with authors, booksellers (really, I wish  more booksellers were working together to, I don't know, create consortiums of passion for books), publishers, everybody.

Community only works if everyone contributes. For this first decade and a half of what is our online revolution, readers, especially, have brought the passion and the innovation while the publishers have remained on the sidelines. But if I'm building my half of the bridge and you're waiting for marketing to devise a project plan, then I have other worlds to explore. If we don't want to talk about the publishing industry in the past tense, then the publishing industry needs to change how it relates to books and readers.

I am not 100% sure of how one goes about building a perfect reading community online (and offline, because it ain't about one medium), but I do know that leaving it up to the readers and authors isn't enough. We need serious industry investment into building serious community. Serious communities require sustained involvement, or if not sustained, then a loom big enough to handle the warps and wefts of individual involvement.

There are communities out there—Shelfari, LibraryThing, Goodreads, among others—and it's a joy to see how these groups are growing and changing. How word spreads from one reader to the next about tools and resources and fun. Like so much of what is happening online when it comes to books, these communities thrive despite the publishing industry. Imagine the possibilities if the industry side of the business threw as much passion into these communities as readers do.

When it comes to building a community of book people, so much of the burden is placed on those who read books (also known as consumers). Maybe once the professionals were able to remain up on the hill, above the community, living off the labor of those on the street. If that time ever existed, it's over now. If the publishing industry doesn't invest in the reading community in a serious, meaningful, sincere manner now, then maybe, like newspapers, the publishing industry as we know it will cease to exist.

Like I said, I'm not worried about the future of the novel. Story will survive. It will thrive. But the industry, the thing we know as publishing? It has to join the community or be cast off into the wilderness.

Or maybe I should just say this: I like to talk about books. Don't you, too?

Posted by: Kassia Krozser

While I am a proud elitist, I am not a literary snob. As I said last time, it's story that moves me, and if I let myself be limited by books I "should" read or authors who pass some sort of weird smell test, then I'm missing out on parts of the entire reading experience. I don't want to do that, and it perplexes me when other people do.

Don't they know that it's a great big world out there? There is no right way to read. It's so important to remember that.

For years now, I've hated on the Los Angeles Times Book Review (and to a certain degree the New York Times) because I see that my hometown paper simply refuses to acknowledge the diversity that is Los Angeles. The LATBR, largely a reflection of the editor, became a pastiche of California history, Hollywood history, obscure biography, and a smattering of mostly literary fiction.

You could argue that these topics are all worthy of reading and reviewing, but I would argue that these topics lead to the state of the LATBR today: it simply isn't valued by a large enough segment of Los Angeles's reading population. Even before it became the flipside half of the opinion section—making it that much harder to find in morass of ads and special inserts—the LATBR was locals only, in the worst possible sense of the term.

While good writers graced the pages, the overall tone was, shall we say?, stultifying. Maybe it was the subject matter, maybe it was the editorial tone, but there wasn't a sense that reading is fun, books are fun, and we shouldn't have to waste our lives slogging through words that simply don't move us emotionally. Most egregiously, the LATBR failed to understand that readers cross the literary plains with ease—there was no reaching across reading cultures, no real attempt to bring the science fiction reader into a different, but equally speculative type of fiction. No "hey, if you like this, you might like this, too."

Newspapers have absolutely no obligation to cover books, especially when books don't pay the bills. Of course, bills are paid in different ways, and if the book review were valuable to the people of Los Angeles, it would be much harder for the powers-that-be (powers that, I am convinced, have no business running a newspaper) to cut and trim and destroy the LATBR. I don't think it's too harsh to suggest that the editorial staff of the LATBR has a whole lot of culpability when it comes to the state of the book review.

My guess is they don't see it that way. During the past year or so, as more book review sections were cut and eliminated, I noted a lot of hand-wringing, but not a lot of proactive action. "We must save the book review!" they cried, but nobody offered solid, practical plans, a smart course of action. There was a sense of entitlement in some of the discussion, a sense that book reviews are "good for us" and must therefore exist in the print edition of a newspaper.

Like millions of people—more than a few of whom are American—I regularly read the book coverage at the Guardian while no longer bothering the sift through the wasted paper to find the LATBR (and, honestly, sometimes I'd just forget that it was upside-down and backwards from the opinion section). I get what I want from our friends across the pond: lively book coverage, diverse opinion, and passion for reading, writing, and publishing.

Book reviews are somewhat tricky, you see. Some people don't want to possess too much information, so they only read for general gist. Others prefer to read the review after they've read the book because that's where the review is most helpful: comparing and contrasting views and thoughts. And there are those who equate "review" with "analysis", looking for more than a review when they encounter discussion about a particular book.

I think the newspaper book review section killed itself, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the model was tired and at the end of its natural life, especially in this age of community and cross-border interaction. Maybe the book review section had to die to give rise to something bigger, better, and, yes, more inclusive: a true literary community. A community that crosses boundaries and lines and social strata. A community that doesn't exist on a publishing timetable. A community that facilitates face-to-face community as much as it does online debate.

A community that loves books—from the moment fingers hit the keyboard (or ink hits the paper) to the moment the reader closes the last page (or turns off the Kindle).

Posted by: Kassia Krozser