Did I Hammer a Nail into My Bookstore's Coffin?

I gave myself a book for my birthday this year: my own novel.

It's still tough to admit that I'm self-published, despite the fact that the publishing world is now a Wild West of rogue indie presses and bowlegged cocky ebook publishers firing their Twitterfeeds in every direction.

Perhaps it's tough to admit because I've been a writer for such a long time, always with the goal of having an editor and publishing house to call my very own. In fact, three years ago, I achieved that goal when my first book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter: A Memoir, was published by a division of Random House. It was a great experience. I had a savvy, smart editor; a darling and energetic publicist; and great reviews in all the right places.

After twenty-five years of working in the trenches as a journalist, essayist, fiction writer, and humorist, I had finally succeeded. My career as an author was launched! Hooray for me!

I didn't get a huge advance, but a reasonable one. Apparently, though, the publishing house paid me too much. I still haven't earned back a penny on that advance, despite selling more books than I ever dreamed possible. That was okay, though. I figured I could build my platform from there and do better with the next book.

No, no, Nanette. Publishing doesn't work that way anymore. These days, if your first book doesn't earn out, that's probably the end of your career—unless you come up with a Really Big Idea, and hardly anybody knows what this is, except that it probably sucks blood.

Over the next three years, I wrote a series of nonfiction book proposals and two novels. Everything was rejected.

One novel came close, however: Sleeping Tigers is an upmarket women's novel that my agent and I hoped would appeal to readers of Eat, Pray, Love. The book tells the story of a woman who starts her life over after a breast cancer scare. She decides to join her wildest childhood friend in San Francisco and track down her drifter brother, who harbors secrets of his own. And, when her brother flees the country, she follows him to Nepal, determined to bring him home.

This was a book with both plot and emotion. It had to make it, right?

Nope. After rejections from editors who were enthusiastic about many aspects of the novel, but “not getting enough support here to make an offer,” I put that book in a drawer. A really deep drawer: in despair over one particular rejection, I actually deleted the entire book from my laptop after consuming half a bottle of Grand Marnier and a box of dark chocolate truffles while watching that creepy movie, Moulin Rouge.

Unlike my other “epic fails,” as my skateboarding son would call them, however, this novel refused to lie quietly in the dark. I suppose that's because this novel had so much of “me” in it.

Like the main character, I survived early stage breast cancer and felt, as my narrator does, that I carried a sleeping tiger inside me that could, at any moment, wake up and use its claws to tear my life apart. I had lived in San Francisco when I finished graduate school and am still enamored of that city, so I sent the main character there to begin her spiritual and emotional healing. And, because I have two brothers and love them dearly, and because I once spent several months trekking in Nepal, I gave my character a brother and took her on an adventure in Nepal that would change her life forever.

When I reexamined Sleeping Tigers, enough time had passed for me to see it in a cold-blooded, critical way. I understood why the editors had turned it down. There were places where the plot dragged or became derailed by side characters who really had nothing to do with the story. There was some strained, self-conscious writing. Some of the images weren't as fresh or funny as I wanted them to be.

Decades ago, editors might have taken a chance on this book and bought it, then worked with me to rewrite it. That hardly ever happens anymore. Now publishing houses are short-staffed, editors are harried, and money is tight.

After tearing apart the novel and rewriting it, I had to figure out what to do with my new draft. Take it back to my agent? He's currently sending another novel of mine around to publishers, plus I have a third novel nearly complete that I'd like him to send out as well. I didn't want to overload the poor guy.

Plus, having been through the traditional publishing process before, I knew that it would take two or three years after the book was accepted for it to be published. Did I really want to wait that long? No.

Finally, a good friend of mine, Terri Giuliano Long, who self-published her well-received novel, In Leah's Wake—a book that falls into the same basic category of commercial women's fiction as Sleeping Tigers—convinced me to be brave and do the same.

I went on the CreateSpace web site, saw that designing and publishing the book on my own could cost less than taking a class at the local community college, and clicked the necessary buttons. If nothing else, I thought that doing this would be tantamount to giving myself a crash course in digital publishing, social media, and publicity—a course that could be valuable no matter how I publish more books in the future. The reality is that every writer now has to be her own publicist.

Publishing Sleeping Tigers through CreateSpace was easy, cheap, and efficient. The staff was remarkably helpful and willing to stay on the phone for as long as I had questions. The process was as user-friendly as sitting in your friend's living room and drinking tea. Or maybe even Merlot.

Still, when my first box of books arrived—a scant seven weeks after starting the process--I immediately got cold feet. Who am I to think that my novel is good enough to be published? Am I now as pathetic as those street poets I used to see in Berkeley, peddling their sappy, mistake-laden chapbooks for a dollar a copy? And how the hell does a writer act as her own publicist?

To make matters worse, it wasn't until after clicking on CreateSpace that I started to think about my good friend here in town, who owns Jabberwocky, one of my favorite independent bookstores. She held the book launch for my memoir, and it was as grand a party as I could have hoped for; she does an incredible job of hand-selling authors she likes. For many years, Jabberwocky has provided a lively space for readers and writers like me to enjoy each other's company, but Amazon has hit her hard. CreateSpace is an Amazon company.

On my web site, I offer people a button that will take them to the independent bookstore of their choice if they want to buy my book locally. Still, I worry that, by publishing Sleeping Tigers with an Amazon company, I've hammered yet another nail into the coffin of my favorite indie bookstores.

At the same time, I'm thrilled to have this option. The characters in Sleeping Tigers refused to die because they had a story to tell—a story I love, and one that I hope readers will love, too. And, in the end, that's why writers write, isn't it? Not for money or glory—admittedly nice perks--but for this simple reason: we want to share our stories.

Book Covers, Backsides and Body Parts

In the book world, you can easily spot novels designed to attract women by the body parts and backsides on their covers.
Don't believe me? Go to Amazon and browse the postage stamp images for anything that falls into the category of women's contemporary fiction, and you'll see what I mean.
Here are a few examples of covers graced with body parts, all featuring legs: Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos, The End of Everything by Megan Abbott, These Things Hidden by Heather Gudenkauf, Falling Home by Karen White, and Heat Wave by Nancy Thayer.
Even more popular for novels destined to be pitched to women's book clubs (the Great Last Hope of the publishing world) is the human backside. The humans are generally women—always slender, usually blonde, typically with their hair in disarray and in a style that shows off a slender neck. They might also be back views of children, usually in motion, and often with flowers around them or held in their sticky little hands. Contemporary examples of what I call BBC's (Backside Book Covers) include Julie Buxbaum's After You, Elin Hilderbrand's Silver Girl, Juliette Fay's Shelter Me, Wendy Wax's Ten Beach Road, and Lesley Kagen's Whistling in the Dark.
I suppose that, in the interest of full disclosure, I ought to mention that my own first book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, also shows the back view of a little girl running through an orchard of flowering trees. When my editor at Broadway Books first showed the design to me, I was appalled—this design was for the paperback, and I'd become enamored of the hardcover, which showed gerbils peering out of a pair of rubber boots. What did a little girl running through an orchard have to do with gerbils? Who was that child, and what the heck was she wearing?
Anyway, that was in 2010, and now I've been through another cover design process, this time for my novel, Sleeping Tigers (due out in December 2011). God help me, I have a body part on the cover.
Let me explain. When the designers sent me a form asking for my ideas, I wrote up a little synopsis of the novel: Jordan O'Malley has everything she ever wanted: a job she loves, a beautiful home, and a dependable boyfriend. When her life unravels after a breast cancer scare, Jordan decides to join her wildest childhood friend in San Francisco and track down her drifter brother, Cam, who harbors secrets of his own.
When Cam suddenly flees the country, Jordan follows, determined to bring him home. Her journey takes her to the farthest reaches of majestic Nepal, where she encounters tests—and truths—about love and family that she never could have imagined.
Funny, heartbreaking, and suspenseful, Sleeping Tigers reminds us all that sometimes it's better to follow your heart instead of a plan.
For cover images, I suggested that the designer look for something representing the title—the “sleeping tiger” within is breast cancer, as my main character, Jordan, sees it, because it can awaken and sharpen its claws at any moment. (Yes, it does sound like an obvious, hit-your-thumb-with-a-hammer image when I sum it up this way, but I'm trying to write a blog post.)
The other images I suggested to the designer were anything that represented Nepal, because I had traveled to Nepal and loved that country so much that I had set a good part of my novel there. I wanted this to be a sort of fictional little sister to the massively successful Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (which, by the way, has neither backsides nor body parts on the original cover).
The result: two completely different cover images. One showed a very literal (if reversed) image representing the title, with a woman sleeping and a faint drawing of a tiger in the background. The other was a gorgeous shot of a Nepali temple with prayer flags fluttering in the wind.
Neither worked. The sleeping woman was intriguing, but looked very Jersey Shore, with her mass of teased blonde hair, pouting lips, and obviously fake eyelashes. That cover might have worked for, say, a paranormal thriller about a woman who morphs into a tiger when she's ticked off, especially when men do her wrong. The other cover, while beautiful, and while certainly in Nepal, was more like the cover of a travel book—maybe one of those Lonely Planet guides, telling you where to buy a coffee for thirty cents in Kathmandu.
What to do? I went back and forth with the designer several times, looked at countless photographs online, and checked out other book covers. It dawned on me, as I made my study over a couple of weeks, that the reason you so rarely see an actual face on a book cover is because then it's harder to imagine the story in a way that lets it surround you completely.
If you don't have a face on a book cover, then you're left with household objects, typically set against a blue background (check out Deep Down True, by Juliette Fay, and Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos), or backsides and body parts that give you the emotional feel of the book—happy, sad, searching, longing, scary, or whatever.
That realization gave me a new idea for the book cover. I asked the designer if she could try just one more thing: show me Nepali images with women in them. She promptly sent me several more possibilities. All of them had Nepalese temples (she must have read Eat, Pray, Love, too), but these included women in the photographs. Most didn't work. The women in the photographs were almost always too young (my character is in her thirties), or too touristy (taking pictures of the temples or standing in line to go into them).
There was one image, however, that I loved: an ancient Nepalese prayer wheel in gorgeous colors, with a woman's hand tentatively reaching out to turn it. But did I really want to contribute yet another book cover with body parts to the genre?
The more I looked at that picture, the more I loved it. The image captured the book completely. There was hope and longing in the touch of those fingertips on the prayer wheel, and the colors were exotic enough to suggest a woman on an adventure.
The woman turning that prayer wheel on the cover of Sleeping Tigers isn't just traveling. She is on an emotional and spiritual journey, like my main character—and like all of us who read because we love being transported to other worlds and other lives. It was perfect.
Yes, my new book cover has a body part. But at least it's a hand and an arm—no legs in sight.