But I digress. I was an idealist even then, and loved the idea that I’d joined a profession so weighty, so worthy. Not every book I’ve worked on since has filled me with altruistic pride, but I’ve worked on many that I think will make a difference to someone. Sometimes the ambition is quiet, like with Marie Tillman’s memoir about coping with grief. In the months
after Marie’s husband Pat was killed, her grief was hard to share with others. But she did find solace in books, which is what ultimately drove her to share her own story. Perhaps, she thought, a person in a similar circumstance might read about her experience and feel more connected. Sometimes the ambition of the book is large and loud– like investigative journalist Alicia Mundy’s desire to take down a pharmaceutical company and reform the FDA with her exposé about the diet drug fen-phen.

I believe Gail’s mantra that books change lives, and obviously being in the business of books has directed my life, but is there a particular book I can point to as influencing my choices, shaping my personality, altering my world view? Marie writes eloquently about the impact of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Author S.E. Hinton receives letters all the time from people claiming that The Outsiders changed the course of their lives. But for me the answer is no– there is no single book that has changed my life. And yet they all have: Dr. Richard Ferber’s Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems (don’t judge!) affects my daily well-being because my infant is sleeping well through the night; a cheesy-looking Sunset cookbook from the 70s has dictated my go-to meals over the past decade; Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation has
severely limited my intake of McDonald’s; and the Twilight series (again– no judging!) often reminds me how important it is to completely escape from reality every so often. Maybe one day a book will see me through a transformative time and will be easy to point to as “The Book.”  Until then, I’m curious: What book has changed your life?

-GF Jenna

This past Wednesday, I was grumpy. I had already had a hectic morning and now I had to traverse three freeways to pick up half a pig. I was supposed to meet Martin between 1:00 and 1:30 outside Seattle in an Embassy Suites parking lot. I couldn’t even get excited about the meat, which usually would have done it, because while I would soon have 60 pounds of delicious, local pork, I lacked a working kitchen in which to cook it. (Note to future
self: Remodeling your kitchen while writing a cookbook is a bit shy of bright.)
No, the very idea of tromping through drywall dust to fill my freezer with meat
I wouldn’t taste for months did little to feed my immediate-gratification-seeking spirit. As of this moment, it was getting late and I was lost. I drove in circles in a sea of strip development looking in vain for Martin’s van. If all this sounds like a drug deal gone bad well, it had started to feel like one.

I finally spotted him, pulled over, and opened up the back of my SUV. He hopped out of his truck smiling and holding out his hand. And you know what, he was lovely. We chatted as I nestled pig parts into my ice chest—about the book, about my brother who had picked up the other half of the pig at their farm, about their pigs and chickens and cows and the meat birds they planned to add to the mix. He told me how they were expanding the
operation to add thousands more chickens, but all in a huge solar-powered cold
frame so they could run around and eat grass year round. He gave me a complimentary dozen eggs to try. We talked meat. Knowing I was curious as to how his Berkshire pig would taste in comparison to plain ole pig, he said this pork should be especially tasty as the pigs had been fed apples from a place called Johnson’s Orchard near the farm. “Johnson’s!” I exclaimed, excited because the orchard is just minutes from where I grew up. Every year in late summer I still go and buy boxes of fruit to take home with me. I still had jam I’d made from their peaches. I felt less than six degrees now separated me from “Handsome Trotter,” the name my seven-year-old had bestowed upon the pig I was packing into my car.

I drove away smiling like I’d just scored some E, already planning how I would cook this apple-fed piggy and buoyed by Martin’s infectious positivity. Martin used to be an architect, he told me, but he loved working outside. More than that, he loved getting out there and talking to people about his farm’s products and how they were produced. He really did. And now, not only did I feel great about eating the meat, I was glad my dollars had gone directly to support their farm. People. They’re even better than pigs.

-GF Lam

It reminded me that, even after all these years working in publishing, I am still entranced by the magic of books. Although this is not a total epiphany, I sometimes lose sight of that fact, especially when working on my own projects. When I am in the trenches with my own book—securing photo permissions, working feverishly toward a looming deadline, laboriously identifying points of interest in Google Maps—it is easy to forget why the idea appealed to me in the first place. (Much as my friends want to believe otherwise, writing a book about Paris was not all sitting in literary cafes dunking croissants in café creme.) Once I had the book in hand, however, all those trying details seemed a distant memory.

The arrival of my little book reminded me that, for all the trials and tribulations the book business has endured in recent years, it still manages to delight and inspire me. I love working behind the scenes to help people nurture an idea. I love polishing and buffing a manuscript to create a seamless experience for the reader. I love rereading something I haven’t read for decades and understanding it from an entirely new perspective (currently To Kill a Mockingbird). I love the smell of Powells when I go in for a late-night browse. I love the collaborative experience of turning an abstract idea into a concrete and handsome object. I feel lucky most of the time that I get to do the work I do but still, hearing that thump on my own doorstep was a concrete reminder of the visceral satisfaction that comes from transforming a kernel of an idea into something real. It’s what every aspiring author dreams of and something I want all of my clients to experience. What publishing moment do you dream of?

Writing regularly takes a lot of discipline and few of us are so perfectly dedicated that we don’t go through periods where we don’t write as often we should (if you do, kindly keep it to yourself). But when you have those times when you just can’t put pen to paper (metaphorically speaking), what exactly is it that’s stopping you?

I recently had lunch with my very wise mentor Patricia Geary (whose work you should all go read immediately) while on vacation in California. We discussed the usual things: what we were writing, what we weren’t writing, who I was dating, how her family was doing. I had a lot to share about my adventures in self-publishing, but had to admit that I had not been as diligent as I wanted to be about working on my novel this past year.

I have a pretty typical publishing sob story: I’ve written a couple of novels, had an agent, experimented with self-publishing (just e-books, not the hard POD stuff). That’s all to say that I’ve had my close-calls and disappointments, my ups and downs, all of it adding up to many, many more pages written than people who have read them. Pat knows the story, of course, and she pointed out that having been through all of this makes it difficult to sit back down and get going on a new book. At some point the sense of  “am I really going to sit back down and write yet another book that no one will read?” can get overwhelming. “That’s what people mean when they say they have writer’s block,” she said.

It rings true. Sometimes I skip a day (or ten) of writing for the same reason I might skip the gym: laziness, inertia, plain old just-don’t-wanna. But sometimes it feels like something deeper. I mean I know why I go to the gym; the benefits are obvious and evident. The why regarding writing (of the creative rather than the paid variety) is somewhat less obvious and asking myself why am I doing this? can leave me not so jazzed about it and feeling downright fearful. That said, this fear cuts both ways–I’ve worked with plenty of writers who feel paralyzed trying to live up to a past success.

I’ve never been blocked in the sense that I couldn’t find something to write about, couldn’t pull characters or plots from my imagination that interested me. If I can get my butt in my chair for an hour a day, something will come out, it’s just that sometimes that chair is the most terrifying place in the world. This is part of the reason I write when I first get out bed in the morning: there’s no time to let the doubt set in. Plus, my thoughts in the early morning tend more towards mmmmm, bacon than toward existential dread.

What do you think about writer’s block? Inevitable burden or mythical beast?

-Andrea

And while you’re at it, talk about the suppression and reinvention of language with an eye toward stripping away all of that pesky nuance. Or txt it. Tht wrks 2.Then maybe move on to the omnipresent screen that’s always on in your house. You know the one—the one that records all your movements, “checks you in” at your neighborhood haunt, tells you how to think and what to do. No, not Facebook, silly. I was still talking about Orwell.

No time to talk about books, you say? Too busy watching the flat screen, so big and 3-D enhanced it almost seems like the walls are talking? Spend so much time with the Kardashians or the Duggars that they feel like your adopted family? Bradbury anticipated you.

As for The Giver. Shucks. How can you not appreciate folks who want to ban a book that describes, as Ms. Lowry notes with some irony, “a world where choice has been taken away”?

Has anyone else read a dystopian fave lately and noted that it’s not just fashion making 2011 look more than a bit like 1984?

–Lam

“It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!”

“I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.”

“Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.”

What’s your favorite Wilde quote?

-Jenna

Since the creation of “vanity” presses, there has been a discomfort associated with self-publishing, the notion this is the last-ditch realm of those not good enough to get published the traditional way. Dealing with the waves of rejection before getting your work published was an important right of passage and a way to hone your work, as it was for Jones. There were many good reasons to dismiss self-publishing back in 2006, as she said; it meant an arduous and expensive process that had little hope of doing anything but draining an author’s pockets.

But things have changed.

In her dismissal of today’s self-publishing possibilities, Jones seems to be taking for granted the idea that good-quality, worthy writing is what makes it through the tortuous publishing process, and bad writing (however you’d like to define it) gets culled along the way. Does anyone actually believe this? If they do, they haven’t worked for a publishing house that has spent mind-bending amounts of advance money on bad knock-offs of whatever vampire/ Nazi/ cozy mystery is currently setting the trend, and they have not lived amongst writers and seen some of the most loathsome get book deals while immensely talented and worthy ones are ignored for being ‘too niche’ or what have you.

What I imagine Jones is partly responding to here is the common fear that as the structure of traditional publishing crumbles further there will no one to gate-keep, no one to curate the experience and help shape novels through the editing process, no one to perform all the very vital functions that happen between author and reader.

As you might have guessed, I have a dog in this fight. I used to work as a publicist for one of the Big Six and now am with a freelancer’s collective in Seattle called Girl Friday Productions. One of the areas in which we are focusing our efforts is on how best to help our author clients take advantage of the dazzling and dizzying new options available in a way that ensures that they’re putting the best work possible out into the world. We also fill in the gaps for authors whose publishers aren’t able to give them the support they need to make the book a success, which is more and more frequently the case.

I’m also a novelist. I came to the game a bit later than Jones, in late 2008, just as the economy was beginning to tank. I had a fabulous agent from Writers House and we shopped my novel to lots of good feedback, one very close call, and, ultimately, no offers. I went back to the drawing board and wrote another novel. My agent had left the business by the time I was finished with it. I started searching for a new one, but found things had gotten even worse. One big reputable agent told me that she liked my novel a lot and thought I had a perfect voice for women’s fiction but that it was just so hard to sell any fiction that didn’t have an historical or magical element these days. I knew it was time for a break when I briefly considered working a warlock into the story.

This past fall, I decided to dust off my first novel and run it in serial on the women’s website I write for TheGloss.com and publish it as an eBook. Because of the low cost and ease of this, I could do it without the pressure of having to put up a bunch of money or knowing a publishing house had done the same. I wanted to see what this new world of publishing was all about and figure that the worst that can happen is I will learn a lot that will be useful both to me and to my clients down the road. I didn’t bypass the editorial or copyediting processes; I got help with those, as I think any author who is self-publishing should.

Do I think traditional publishing is obsolete? Absolutely not. I just think it needs to get with the program, and fast. The talent within these houses is immense and their usefulness to authors is incontrovertible, but the system itself is broken. Between the Vegas-style gambles with huge advances, the insane retail model, and overhead costs, how anyone could think it has a sound future is beyond me.

Because of the system of returns (wherein retailers send back books that don’t sell) in publishing, publishers have to focus on pushing a book as hard as they can after the on-sale date to make it work. And the overhead for publishing a book, between printing and shipping costs, staffing costs, office space in Manhattan in most cases, is immense. It’s a pressure cooker in which publishers only really make money from break-out bestsellers and lose money on most books. So they’re stuck trying to predict what might be a huge seller and take accordingly Vegas-style gamble with advance payments–most of which are never earned through.

I think its incumbent on all of us who love books to think up new and better ways to find and nurture great talent and help bring it to readers, however that happens in publishing’s brave new digital world. And people are innovating: from Seth Godin’s domino project to Red Lemonade to Emily Books to self-published authors like John Locke and Amanda Hocking who are making huge waves.

Like Jones, I learned a lot from going through traditional channels, just as I learned a lot from my time working for a big New York house. But this would all be useless to me if I wasn’t willing to embrace the new frontier of book publishing. Because it is coming, whether we like it or not.

The old system worked well for Jones; it did what it was meant to by keeping her out when she wasn’t ready and giving her a leg up when she was. But to pretend that the chief function of people who work in publishing is to help authors reach their potential is to disregard all of the real financial concerns that hang over the heads of publishers. But now, books can be shared and read inexpensively and if an author works hard enough to find an audience, they can become a success with or without the gatekeepers. And I think this can only be a good thing for writers and readers.

-Andrea