End-of-year thanks

Publishing a book is a group effort

When I got out of college and first went to work in publishing, I thought I knew a lot about books. I had, you see, read a lot of books. More than most people, including because my mother had a bookstore, and always let me take everything I wanted, which was inevitably a lot. And I had written a lot, if only just for school. I thought I knew something about writing, which I didn’t, really, and still don’t.

What I didn’t know, and didn’t even know I didn’t know, was how a book goes from being written to being read. That process between those two points is called publishing, and it includes so many steps, so many people, so much devotion, so many entire lives, that I felt that it was the most interesting thing ever. Learning about it reminded me of David Macaulay’s books, which I read as a child, which told you how some massive building was built, or how, to borrow one of his titles, “The Way Things Work.” I always loved these books, in the same way I liked peering behind the scenes, at anything from bad TV shows about what really goes on in the kitchen of a restaurant to, well, writing biographies. I loved knowing the story behind the story.

Learning about publishing was like that for me. I thought there were writers, and then there were books. Well, I guess I knew there were booksellers, like my mom, but I don’t think I really knew what they did until I was a lot older. I don’t think I thought about how their personalities, their educations, their sense of style, their ethics and their values could be expressed by what you saw when you walked in the door. I don’t think I really thought about why one bookstore was my favorite place in the world, and why another sort of sucked.

But at least I knew what they were. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what literary agents and editors were, or editorial assistants, or publicists, or how the marketing person was different from the sales person, or how the interior designer was a competely different person from the jacket designer, or why one book might get reviewed in the Houston Chronicle but not — and I mean under no circumstances — in the Dallas Morning News. I never thought about who took the author photo, and I never thought about why certain pictures are in a book and certain pictures are not in a book.

It was a construction as intricate as a cathedral. And what I was learning was nothing less than how ideas circulate in society. It was an intense education then, and one I was immensely grateful for when I started to write myself.

When you publish a book, you rack up so many debts to so many people that you get a little bit dizzy when you try to name them all. You’re inevitably going to forget someone: but let’s just say, there are a lot of them — a lot of you. This is a group effort, and I appreciate everyone who made this such a fun few months for me.

The best thing about this book, for me, was the discussions it brought up. When you write a biography, you get used to answering questions that range from the basic — Who was Clarice Lispector? — to the gossipy — Why was Susan so mean to her girlfriend?

This book was different. It’s about another question — Who cares about art ? Thanks to everyone who turned up to discuss it, to argue about it, to keep art and beauty and ideas alive at a time when there is so much darkness around us.

Of course, if you want to buy the book, you still can! I would be immensely grateful. For now, it’s available in editions in the UK and the US as well as in Dutch, with more coming soon.

One more thing: I am told that it is a big help if you would leave a review of the book on Amazon. Yes, I know, Amazon. But it’s by far the biggest retailer out there, and a book that gets a lot of reviews there can get some kind of bump. Don’t ask me what kind of bump! But people who know — people whose existence I would not have suspected when I got out of school — say that it gets a bump. Click here.

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By the way: I also published a translation of Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark last month. Because of reasons related to the world going straight to hell, it didn’t get as much attention as it deserved, but it’s a great novel, a novel I had great pleasure in translating. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: only when you go through Clarice’s sentences word by word do you realize what a genius she really was. It’s been a privilege to spend so many years in her company.