Notes from the Bookfair

  

Mixing overtones of swap meet and art fest, the L.A. Times Festival of Books presents an enigmatic facade.  Where the cynic sees a marketing circus, the optimist finds a celebration of literary inspiration.  People capable of a more subtle perspective may perceive the bookfair as a gathering of dualities:  the soulful and the corporate, the silly and the serious, the creative and the commercial.

 

Held in late April on the stately grounds of USC, the bookfair draws roughly 150,000 attendees, who circulate among the canopies of several hundred vendors.  (Anyone unfortunate enough to drive near USC during this time will likely add bookfair traffic to the long list of complaints about living in L.A.)  For the vendor, the crowd represents an opportunity to get a product before more eyeballs in less time than most publishing schemes.  The vending booth functions like a highway billboard, enticing the impulse buyer to make a purchase and instilling in others a subliminal imprint for future sales.  However, in the manner of dualities, the very size of the bookfair creates its chief flaw.  Lost in a maze of vending booths, the dazed attendees walk like zombies, their brains overwhelmed by the barrage of posters, flyers, and other promotional ammunition assaulting them from every direction.  Amid such chaos, people truly do judge a book by its cover--if they manage to see it at all.

 

As an obscure author working with a niche publisher, I often wonder where to draw the line between sensible marketing and vanity extravagance.  Deciphering the murky correlation between promotion and sales requires a business acumen beyond my artistic sensibilities.  Fortunately, I write for fun--in other words, to indulge my vagabond mental digressions--and know enough about America’s reading preferences to realize the surf travel memoir, the “genre” in which I specialize, won’t resonate with a mainstream audience eager for romance or mystery novels.   What economists call the Law of Diminishing Returns applies with callous efficiency in niche markets.  Additionally, statistics show that most book sales take place via Amazon.  Despite trade organization reports showing that print books dominate total sales revenue, I suspect digital format sales (e-book and subscription KENP) outnumber print in terms of unit volume.  For my travel memoir, print copies account for only 30% of units sold, a statistic easily explained by price differentials:  the e-book costs roughly one-tenth the price of the paperback, while the KENP offers the convenient perks of kindle.  In light of this trend, bookfairs seem like anachronistic and possibly counter-productive forms of marketing.  A Google search about authors’ bookfair experiences yields many curmudgeons who contend the events exist primarily to enrich the organizers.

 

 But I regard the writer’s journey as a marathon, not a sprint, and sometimes that means viewing opportunities in terms of passion rather than finance.  One never knows what synergies might result from placing a product of creative energy before the public eye.  Like a splash in a cosmic pond, the melding of book and reader might create ripples that transcend balance sheet metrics.

  

Emboldened by such idealism--what experienced booksellers might call wishful thinking--I followed my entrepreneurial muse to USC, undeterred by a late season rainstorm that brought echoes of winter to normally sunny L.A., taco trucks that ransomed nachos for twenty dollars a plate, and embarrassing displays of shameless self-promotion (“buy my book! You’ll love my book!” hollered one exuberant vendor).  Promoting my wares, I rediscovered customer service skills dormant since college, pondered deep questions about the aesthetics of display, and joined my fellow vendors in a rite of passage:  lugging boxes of unsold inventory back to the parking garage.   As a stepping-stone on my writer’s journey, the experience provided some important tidbits of wisdom: 

 

--have fun!

Often, the world will express indifference to the artistic creation for which you’ve staked so much time and effort.  Watching the portion of humanity who supposedly loves reading (a not unreasonable supposition about bookfair attendees) give you the cold shoulder emphasizes this indifference in a uniquely callous way.  For the aspiring author, humor lessens the tendency to interpret public apathy as a personal indictment and grants a more playful perspective. As if to emphasize this point, USC kicks off the bookfair by trotting out several dozen of their finest cheerleaders to get everyone properly excited.  Scantily clad, swinging their legs like aspiring Rockettes, these nymphs provide a spicy reminder of how attitude influences experience.  If you doubt the value of this promotional stunt, consider that in L.A., a city devoted to botox beauty and credit card lifestyles, artifice often speaks louder than art.  To generalize from a Cheryl Crow song, all the people want to do is have some fun, and when the sun comes up over Exposition Park, they remember those who put the “fest” in festival.  For authors, this might mean including some carnival games with books as prizes, or wearing edgy clothing, such as a shirt that says “writers do it with imagination” (you’d be surprised at the sort of people intrigued by this slogan).    

 

-- Cultivate authentic connections. . .

Today’s screen-mediated culture makes human connections increasingly elusive.  Yet we remain social creatures who crave conversation and proof that we know how to function without the internet.  As a catalyst for curiosity, a book can attract people who might otherwise remain aloof.  I’ll long remember the conversation I had with Alexx, a college student drawn to the cover design of my travel memoir.  Questions about the book led to talk of surf travel, and I soon discovered that this girl half my age boasted a travel resume that put me to shame.  We had so much fun discussing bucket list destinations that we ignored the unpleasantry of a passing rainsquall.  Similarly memorable was my conversation with Paul, a true So Cal waterman whose photos of marine life encountered during his open ocean swims merited a coffee table edition.  These and other encounters occurred because my travel memoir provided a bridge to moments of shared experience.

Of course, some who browse your wares care little about connection.   The bookfair abounds with folks who come not for the books but for the giveaways:  pens, notepads, coasters, and assorted useless-but-free baubles which make petty materialists salivate.  Include the insistent trickle of interlopers looking to pitch their gimmicks--book marketing schemes, audiobook narrations, etc.--and you soon suspect even genuine customers of ulterior motives.  My advice?  Borrow a page from the interloper’s playbook and consider how you might implement your own proactive schmoozing agenda.  Walk among the booths, express interest in some books that intrigue you, and offer the author a copy of your book in exchange.  (This works best for books in similar genres.)  Not only will you lighten your inventory, but you’ll likely enjoy some worthwhile conversation and possibly connect on LinkedIn.

 

--Keep things in perspective. . .     

It’s tempting to think that inclusion in one of the world’s largest bookfair events will garner your title a commensurate promotional buzz.  Lest delusions of grandeur pave the way for disappointment, do some sober research on the sales metrics typical of swap-meet retailing.  To start, consider the cold-caller’s “one percent rule:” for every hundred people solicited, ten might express interest, and of those, one might make a purchase.  Then, reduce this further to account for the fact that 1) only a small portion of bookfair attendees will actually approach your booth, 2) only a fraction of these “prospects” will appreciate your genre specialty, and 3) only a fraction of those will give your book open-minded consideration rather than cynical prejudice.  In other words, for obscure authors, the distribution of probable outcomes skews toward a low-sales number.  But a silver lining shimmers for those willing to perceive it.  First, a low sales volume says more about the whimsical nature of shoppers than the literary quality of a book.  Second, the disappointment of selling ten copies where you hoped to sell fifty subsides when you realize that on Amazon, selling ten copies in one day would likely propel that title temporarily into the top ranks of the genre.  Finally, if you perceive the bookfair not as a showcase for books but rather an educational experience for authors, you might find you learned valuable lessons.  

  

 

 Is the bookfair worth it?  Such a question invokes the wrong assessment criteria, reducing the event to mere balance sheet metrics.  I sold fewer books than hoped, but enough to affirm my efforts.  Accordingly, I might pose a different question:  does the bookfair take you further along the author’s journey?  Literary circles give the “author process” relatively little fanfare, disdaining humdrum topics like marketing and brand development, but it actually has much in common with the writing process.  Building a readership requires dedication, sacrifice, and doubt-inducing setbacks.  Like the writing process, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.  You make progress in increments of perseverance.  Then, riding your second wind, you find beautiful moments otherwise unperceived.

Speaking of beautiful moments, did I mention those USC cheerleaders?

Writing Like We Talk: The Stylistic Implications

 

 

       The popular reception of Mark Twain’s writings prompted critics to view the depiction of colloquial speech in literary texts as legitimate art, enhancing realist, modernist, and contemporary fiction.  Yet such depictions require caution, for non-literary forms, when mingled with literary discourse, pose significant stylistic concerns. 

     Oral discourse, and the modes often associated with it--movies, television, and modern theater, for example--convey immediacy and emotion, characterized by pause fillers, emphatic intonations, and street slang.  Literary texts, on the other hand, connote cautious, planned, respectable language, the hallmark of intellectual society.  The polarity extends further:  composed of the best in language and thought, literature enjoys elite patrons and political prestige, such that many scholars consider it a yardstick of culture.  However, decades of technological and cultural change have eroded the distinction between literary and non-literary discourse.  In the era of texting and emojis, steadfast adherence to literary convention risks archaic formality. 

     Knowing the forms orality takes in writing can help writers make more conscious sentence-level choices.  Quotes, perhaps the most obvious conversational marker, represent a decision to distance quoted material from the surrounding authorial voice.  Responsibility for the material, the quotes imply, belongs elsewhere.  Quotation marks, then, serve an important rhetorical function.  Employing them signifies a choice to call on outside voices, mingling a text’s literary quality with conversational elements that, depending on context, may indicate the writer’s deference to authority (and, by extension, intellectual private property) or create distance between the author and statements deemed unfit for direct association.

     To the extent that quotation marks signify extra-textual language, we may regard them as conversational.  However, not until the post-Twain era did writers develop informal conversation as a literary trope.  To glimpse the formality with which prior authors treated conversation, we might highlight the 18^th Century literary figure Samuel Johnson, whose biographer recorded conversations not in an immediate, emotional manner, but rather in planned aesthetic sentences.  Presenting conversation according to the literary standards of the day, the biographer (Boswell) eschewed the conversational markers (italics, pause fillers, fragments, etc.) that pervade modern texts.  By contrast, modern writers embrace features considered too informal by 18^th Century standards.  Italics, for example, disrupt the visual uniformity of text in a way that suggests drama and emphasis.  Pay attention to this, they convey!  Since writing offers other means of emphasis, such as placing new information at the end of a clause, italics constitute a decision to favor the immediacy of oral markers.  Beyond italics, writers might employ additional techniques.  Running words together (“whodunnit” for example) brings the hurried pace of oral discourse to a text by calling our attention not to the word but to the phonetic qualities of rapid speech.  Insofar as phonetics denote sound, foregrounding them implies a choice to create urgency via nonliterary means.  Similarly, the emotional tone suggested by fragments (i.e. “yummy!”) and the mental stumbles suggested by pause fillers (“um,” “well”), when written, bring emotional immediacy, imbuing the text with an improvised, even frenetic, tone.

     The markers discussed above present a key stylistic concern for writers.  Emphasizing a conversational tone through oral text markers often means denying the use of literate methods.  When a writer foregrounds orality to excess, so that, as with strung-together words, the text unintentionally reads like a comic book, readers may conclude the writer lacks control.   Accordingly, recognizing the features of both literary and oral discourse can help writers more fully appreciate how mode affects meaning.  Once chosen, a mode involves expectations and requirements.  Just as graffiti requires an illicit canvas, and loses its counter-culture impact if transmitted via Morse code or communicated through a TV commercial, so must writing intended as literature adhere to the expectations of the literary mode.  Here the aesthetics of the pre-Twain eras retain their value: while conversational markers can enhance a writer’s literary toolkit, they can’t in themselves substitute for literature.

Rhetoric in the Writing Classroom: Tracing an Ancient Heritage

 

 

 

 

 Mocked as uptight grammarians, more often typecast as junior-high schoolmarms than poetic personalities, English teachers, contrary to stereotype, actually continue a noble tradition whose origins date back to the Greco-Roman beginnings of Western civilization.  A scholarly anthology titled Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse explores this ancient heritage, linking today’s writing classroom with the great names in rhetoric from Greek and Roman times.  Noting the influence of such luminaries as Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, the book traces the evolution of rhetoric through time, providing a fascinating perspective on how rhetoric and the quest for truth relate historically and inform English courses today.

     While “quest for truth” perhaps overly-dramatizes what writing students experience, Plato teaches that a spiritual element underlies writing pursued as an act of discovery.  An essay by Jeremy Golden elaborates: “the subject of knowledge. . .has as its starting and finishing points ideal forms situated in the mind of God.  The forms. . .represent the ultimate truth to be sought.”  Plato’s rhetorical forms--particularly the famous dialectic--function as yoga for the mind, deepening the awareness of dedicated rhetoricians.  The dialectic, defined as “purifying” process of refutation and re-examination, provides a strategic formula for clarifying ideas, developing arguments, and thinking critically.  Today, English teachers invoke a basic dialectic when they encourage students to write with a reader’s perspective.  Switching roles from writer-based text generation to reader-based text evaluation helps students clarify unstated assumptions and encourages a revision of content and phrasing that teachers might call “sentence truth.”

     Plato looms large not only for his direct influence on rhetoric but as a counterpoint for other thinkers who modified his ideas through time.  An essay by James Kinneavy describes these changes and their perpetrators: “on the issue of epistemology Isocrates directly opposed Plato. . .In speech after speech he inveighed against the type of theory and science represented by Parmenides and Plato.”  Similar to the Sophists, a group skilled at using emotional appeals and figures of speech to persuade audiences, Isocrates knew how style could influence jurors, and began a school dedicated to the intense practice of courtroom oratory.  Unlike Plato, he did not attribute a spiritual value to the theory of forms nor did he require true evidence to support his arguments.  Rather, the school emphasized imitation and manner, an approach which ultimately had a lasting effect on rhetoric and Isocrates’ place in history.  Says Kinneavy: “It was through these kinds of discourse, learned by an almost mechanical imitation, that most of the writers of western civilization in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance learned to write.  Isocrates, in this sense, is the father of western humanism.”  Though criticized through history for their emphasis on style over substance, the Sophists nevertheless exert an influence in the today’s writing classroom.  When English teachers call attention to model texts, literary tropes, and artistic devices (e.g., parallel structure, active voice phrasings, etc.), they echo Sophist principles that emphasize stylistic presentation.

     Other names deserve honorable mention.  The widely taught (and widely disliked) five-paragraph essay originated with Quintilian, a Roman who thought it the ideal form for courtroom oratory.  An introductory paragraph sought to win the sympathies of the jurors; a magic number of three supporting arguments sought to justify those sympathies; and finally the conclusion reminded the jury why they felt sympathetic.  Though criticized by many teachers as artificial and impractical, a form stifling to creativity and irrelevant to how actual writers approach real-world writing tasks, the five-paragraph model nevertheless exemplifies the enduring influence of classical rhetoric.  At its core, writing consists of assertion and proof, a conceptual movement from general to specific (and vice-versa), patterns the five-paragraph model emphatically reinforces.  Designed for courtroom oratory, the five-paragraph model emphasizes that writers function in partnership with an audience who expects clarity and organization.  The fact that English textbooks have devoted more ink to the five-paragraph format that any other organizational approach testifies to Quintilian’s legacy.

     The editors of the book conclude with a message for English departments in particular and academic institutions in general.  At one time, no departments existed in colleges, and rhetoric represented the main discipline.  During the Nineteenth Century, however, the Belles-lettres movement downplayed ancient rhetoric influences, advocating English studies in place of the classics.  The discipline of English severed from rhetoric (later the concern of Speech Communication) to the detriment of both.  While many attempts to re-unify the two disciplines took place over the years, not until the publication of Rhetoric:  Principles and Usage by Duhaumel and Hughes did classical rhetoric return as a subject worthy of English studies.  The challenge of rhetoric today, contend the editors of Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, is to unite disciplines previously in contention with one another, to the advantage of both.

     In light of recent instructional trends, the book perhaps offers an additional message:  proper writing instruction emphasizes the principles of classical rhetoric.  At a time when English teachers increasingly embrace identity politics, masquerading as sociologists while they discuss “positionality,” “asymmetrical power structures,” and other notions borrowed from post-deconstructionist, post-relevant discourse theory, the practical purpose of English courses increasingly diminishes.  Most students today express little interest in agitation propaganda. Juggling work, school, and family obligations, they seek not to disrupt the dominant paradigm but find a place within it.  In this regard they have much in common with the tunic-clad Athenian youth who, admiring Plato in 400 B.C., sought insight from “the good person speaking well.”