Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com.
Today's guest is Tom Lutz, editor in chief of the l. A Review of Books, a non profit dedicated to promoting writing about literature, culture and the arts. Tom teaches creative writing at the University of California in Riverside and is on a quest to visit every country in the world. 135 down, only 60 to go. Tom has dovetailed his wanderlust and passion for writing into seven nonfiction books, some on travel one on the history of slackers, another on the history of tears. His first crime novel, Born Slippy, was published in January. Tom joined me today to talk about some of the monumental changes he's seen in publishing during this decade as well as how global trade and politics affects every day artists.
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Mindy: You're the editor in chief of the L. A Review of Books, as well as being a creative writing teacher at the University of California and a novelist yourself. So you have been in the publishing industry ins and outs for a while. My listeners are mostly made up of aspiring writers and also some published authors, so a lot of them are really interested in hearing about the industry, in general. You've been around and seen things come and go, so if you could just talk a little bit about the industry in general, where it's been where it is now and where it could be going.
Tom: I should preface it by saying, Nobody knows anything and that includes me. It's a, uh it's an industry where things have been changing very fast for a long time. For a couple of decades now, things have been changing very regularly and very quickly. Whatever one guesses about the way things are today, they're going to be different again tomorrow. So with that caveat, obviously the big change in our lifetimes is the e emergence of Amazon as the dominant player in book distribution. What happened when that happened, is that they kind of made their mark in the world by offering books at a much lower prices than anyone else. That helped put the big chains out of business. It put a lot of small book stores out of business, help squeeze publishers profits quite a bit. They require publishers to give them a bigger discount than other distributors have in the past.
Now that I'm also a publisher, we LARB publishes books. Now we are putting out six or seven books, a year and once every couple of months. I get a notice from Amazon that the amendment they're gonna pay me for book dipping down a couple more pennies. Its a couple more pennies each never a big change. But it's always a change in their favor, and that has made everything tougher for publishers. Publishing was always a tough business to be in. Imagine if you were selling pants, just clothing stores, clothing store bought the pants and they could, at any point up for years could just send you back any of the pants that they didn't manage to sell and expect full price in return. And have you pay the shipping in both directions. So it's a very strange business to begin with, different than any other business.
Tom: And it's always been tough for publishers to make a living. Amazon has changed the margins, and the margins were never very large. It's a tougher and tougher business for publishers to survive in, and one of the ways I think publishers have done it is by, like movie studios, relying more and more on blockbusters. If they can kind of always be looking for blockbusters. Used to be that a prestige publisher would have the majority of their list being books that the editors really cared about and a couple of books each year that would sell more copies than anything else, but maybe were not dear to the editors’ hearts. They're just the books that would support the place, the midlist books, as we call them. The books that were never expected to sell a 1,000,000 copies.
Those books have been harder and harder to publish, and that's got mostly a bad impact on writers but maybe a good impact on readers in that lots of tiny publishers like us have popped up to pick up all of the books that the big publishers don't oh, don't publish anymore. We're publishing those books. We can't pay the author very well, but the books are getting out there. So it's the It's the best of times and the worst of times.
Mindy: The mid list, as you mentioned, keeps feeling that squeeze, too. It's harder and harder to get published, and I know myself as a YA author. The past 15 years has just been kind of a free for all for YA. It grew and expanded incredibly, and now it is going back to the median and it's shifting. And it's becoming more and more difficult to get picked up to break in as a YA author. And it's becoming more difficult also for those of us who have been around for a while to continue to publish because, as you were saying, publishers are relying on those big black busters. And as soon as you have one book published that maybe didn't do so well, your profit and loss sheet doesn't look good anymore. They're less likely to give you a livable advance. You may not even get published if you have one book that doesn't do well. Continuing a career is very difficult now. If you're midlist.
Tom: It is. It is because a publisher can look at a book. They think - you know what this could catch on. This could be a seller. Let's let's take a chance on it. And if they do that once for you and it doesn't sell a lot, then it's very hard to get them to take the second chance. And if they take the second chance and that doesn't go over, you're kind of SOL. Tt is becoming tougher. People I know who used to get $50,000 advances on their books are getting $5000 advances. People that used to get $5000 advances are getting $500 advances, and people that used to get $1000 advances are getting no advances. At every level, things have gone down a little bit. Stephen King. Still, he's fine.
Mindy: Right?
Tom: Yeah, The perennial sellers, the David Baldacci's, and Michael Connelly's. They're doing fine. If you're on a rack at an airport, you're doing fine and you're making a perfectly good living off the mid list, as we call it, which is, everybody else is having a tough time. On the other hand, if you're a new author and you are trying to have your first book published, it's never been easier. You can't make any money, probably, but you can, but you can if you certainly wish, you can obviously self publish. But even without self publishing, there are lots of places that are that are willing to take a risk, especially at a print on demand basis, and let you try to get your wares out there.
Mindy: You mentioned airports It's funny how once you've been in the business a while you start to learn what are indicators of success. And getting shelf space in an airport bookstore is a definite indicator of success as well as just being out in a Kroger, a Target, a Walmart. If you get shelf space in those that is a big deal, your publisher put you out there. It's just funny to me as an author the things that you learn. So if I'm walking through a Target and I see one of my friends on the shelf, I take a picture and I text them right way like Did you know that you're on the shelf in Target? You know, and that's a huge deal.
Tom: It's a very big deal. I mean, it's both. It's both an indicator of success, and it's a perpetuater of success because once you get into a venue like that, you're going to sell more books. Roughly 25% of all books are sold in those big box stores. If you're in there, the sense is that you're you're already in the top selling category or you wouldn't get there. I have a friend who sold 50,000 copies of her book on one day. Costco bought 25,000 and Wal Mart, about 25,000 in the same day.
Those stores sell an enormous number of books and more books than all the independent bookstores put together. It's a major thing getting in there and the airports, as well. If you get into an airport bookstore, you're gonna you're gonna sell more copies than you possibly could any other way.
One of the things I should say too, is that I'm you know, I started life as a literary historian. Well, I started life as a carpenter, but once I started going to school in my late twenties and then went and got my PhD, I was a was a literary historian, and I watched the kind of publishing industry in America from the 19th century through to the present. And there have been waves in which a few companies start to buy up all of their rivals. There's consolidation that means that they're getting run on a strict business basis, and they tend towards blockbuster understandings of what you should do and what they should publish what they shouldn't.
When that happens, a bunch of little publishers pop up, and this was true at the turn of the century again in the 19 twenties. In the 19 twenties, you know, Alfred A. Knpof and his wife, they started a publishing company in their living room. Basically, Simon and Schuster were a couple of booksellers who didn't like what they were getting from the big publishers and decided to start a publishing house in the back room of their bookstore. Most of what we think of as the great literature from the 19 twenties was published by these little tiny houses, and I think that we're in a period like that now, where the little houses are publishing really interesting, great work. It's hard for it to find its full potential audience, but history will be kind to the little publishers.
Mindy: I don't know if you saw the news just broke. Ah, maybe two or three hours ago, but Hachette Book Group, bought I don't know how many backlist but a few 1000 off of Disney Hyperion today. A little more consolidation going on.
Tom: And that means that you have to get your ideas past the businessman. And also, you know, the other thing that's changed is that everybody has Bookscan. It tells you exactly how many copies of every book that that was ever sold. And it used to be that your agent could go into a book seller say, Oh, yeah, has his last book her, her last book did really well, especially among young people, The publisher can look at Bookscan and say, Well, it sold, 375 copies. I don't think that's really well, and, uh, we're not interested. So amazing amount of information helps the business people win the argument against the editorial people over and over again.
Mindy: Yes, certainly. And something else that the average just reader doesn't realize is how politics and global economies can effect an author. So, for example, the cost of paper with trade embargoes in China has changed my experience as an author. I don't get as many arcs as many review copies of my books. They simply don't exist anymore. I have some. I don't have the amount that I used to have and, again, just global politics. I had a couple of Turkish foreign language deals that went belly up about two years ago because there was so much political turmoil in that country. And it's interesting to me as an artist, a writer living in rural Ohio. Political turmoil in Turkey directly affects me. Those ripples in the pond hit everyone.
Tom: Yes, they certainly do! And of course, the paper shortage, one of the main causes of our current paper shortage, which is hitting everybody. And it's making delivery dates late and everything else. Paper shortage is a serious problem right now, and one of the causes of it is that Amazon is buying an enormous amount of paper for the cardboard boxes that they ship, not just books, but everything else to people in. They're part of the paper problem.
Well, one other thing about the global economy. It impacts us because of desktop publishing because it's so easy. If you want to become a publisher, you can do it tomorrow. Build a book on on your computer. You can send it off to a printer on your computer. You're gonna have it. You can have copies, uh, in a matter of weeks. So it's very, very easy. And that means that piracy has become incredibly easy as well. Yes. So the very first copy of Michael Wolf's look about the Trump administration. The very first copy I saw that was on the street in Bangladesh. Somebody offered it to me a stack of books and it hasn't even been published yet in the U. S. It was the only the only way it was available was as as an advance review copy. And it was already kind of for sale by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids that are running around in the traffic selling books to people on the street.
Mindy: Wow. And that is a physical copy. An e copy is even easier to pirate. I know a lot of people don't realize, but the way the current copyright law is set up, if you find someone that has illegal download of your book available, you can send them a takedown notice and they take it down. And they are in compliance with the law by taking it down. And all they have to do is change that URL and put it up again.
Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've found several of my books online. Yeah,
Mindy: Me too. It really is like hitting gophers at the at... the fair game?
Tom: Yeah, it's Whack a Mole. On the other hand, what are we gonna do? Quit show business? As they say, No, I'm not gonna feel right if I'm not writing and therefore we want to publish them and therefore we live with the world we're in. What most of us are doing is figuring out ways to monetize our expertise that is not strictly tied to the copies we sell of a book. A lot of us that means teaching as I do at a university, all sorts of other activities. Kind of like what you're what you're doing right now is a way to kind of monetize your expertise is a way to kind of take what you know, develop an income stream out of it. That's what kind of what what writers need to do now. This has always been true for poets. It hasn't always been true for fiction writers. Poets have never been to make a living from selling copies of poetry books. Not for the last 150 years. It's something that they're used to and we're just learning.
Mindy: Side hustle is half my income.
Tom: Exactly, exactly. But most of the writers I know are into multiple side hustles, and that's, uh, that's how they keep body and soul together.
Mindy: So, speaking of different mediums, we talked about print books and paper, and we talked about E books as well, on the problem of pirating. Audio has exploded recently. So why you think that happened? And what are the pros and cons?
Tom: I don't see any cons to it. I like to listen to books. I mean, I think it's a slightly different experience. People talk about the difference between reading in paper and reading electronically, and I don't I find that when I'm in the throes of a reading experience, but I'm really wrapped up in a book. I don't notice whether it's paper or or a Kindle or even a phone. I just I'm just kind of wrapped up in what's happening. But audio is a significantly different. It's different to listen to a piece than it is to read it. I love the audio experience in a way that I love television, and I love movies, and I love movies on the television and movies in the theater. They're all slightly different experiences.
But I'm completely platform agnostic in terms of my own enjoyment. I think that the reason that audio is taken off has to do with the fact that we have, everyone has a player in their pocket at all times. Most Americans commute at least a little. It has become a standard part of most, of a lot of people's commutes to listen to books. The Podcast Revolution has made us think more often about what's available to us to listen to rather than immediately just popping on the radio in the car. And we're in a world in which our audio experience is a is a kind of central part of our daily lives, and books have benefited from that.
Mindy: For me as a consumer in the past, before we had digital audio books, I didn't use them because I can read faster than the performer is narrating. If I were to use an audio book like a CD player in my car, obviously when I'm driving, I can't be reading a physical book. But I'm making slower progress than I would be actually holding a book and reading it. But now, with the digitals, you know I can listen to them at 1.5 speed or two times speed, depending on how fast the narrator goes. And so now I'm just destroying my TBR. I have long drives when I'm doing school visits or going to a library for an appearance or a bookstore, and I can I can listen to three novels in a week. Now the digitization of the audio book has made. It's completely changed how I consume my books now.
Tom: Yeah, me too. I like 1.25 If you're at 1.5, you really have to kind of pay attention a long time. And you can at 1.25 you can drift a little bit.
Mindy: Lately, I have had the experience of falling asleep on a plane while listening to an audiobook and waking up and just being like, I have no idea what's going on.
Tom: You know, having ti backtrack, that is a downside. I mean, when you're you know, I think that experience we all have had when reading a paper book that you're flipping through pages and you realize you've been technically reading for for 10, minutes. But you stopped actually processing it and then your eyes, they're going across lines, and so you have to go back and find where you are. That's fairly, it's easiest to do in a paper book. It's a second easiest to do in an electronic book, and it's the hardest to do. Audio wise, absolutely.
Mindy: Backtracking on audio is tedious.
Coming up Tom's first crime novel, Born Slippy and tackling the topic of toxic masculinity.
Mindy: So let's switch tracks and talk about your first crime novel. Born Slippy. It came out in January. So if you could tell my listeners what Born Slippy is about.
Tom: Born Slippy is a bit of a literary thriller that's about a very, very bad man named Dmitri, it's told from close third person Perspective by Frank. He represents the kind of reader's view of things, but he's also a little bit slower than the reader. I've always liked these novels, from Tristram Shandy to Candide, to The Great Gatsby, where the the narrator is a little bit slower on the uptake than the reader. We're a little bit of ahead of the narrator, Frank Is that is that guy.
He is fascinated by Dmitri and repelled by him at the same time. For some reason, Dmitri keeps coming by to find him and look him up over the years. And, uh, they keep a friendship going against all odds, because Dimitri is a terrible human being in all sorts of ways. A charming, sociopath. So he is charming and this and I think he's really fun character to read. We don't like those Tony Soprano, Walter White, kind of terrible people, but ah, we're fascinated by them. We stay, we stay with them, and Dimitri is kind of fun that way. So let's just say mayhem ensues.
Mindy: Born Slippy is pitched as a provocative, globe trotting, time shifting novel about the seductions of and resistance to toxic masculinity. So what do each of these characters Frank and Dimitri bring to the page in terms of toxic masculinity?
Tom: I was very conscious of the long history of the kind of buddy novel and the buddy, you know, if you think of On the Road and the buddy film, the main character and the sidekick and the way in which novels and films are have always been models for how to be in the world for men and boys. Sometimes models of bad behaviors was as well as good behavior.
I was interested in thinking about how it is that misogyny gets re created. Was that there was a period when we really we thought we fixed this. Feminism came in and kind of steered us all right. And now we understand how misogyny operates and we're no longer going to do that. I mean, you know, I've had students telling me that they're not feminist, cause there's no reason to have feminism anymore. We've solved problems. Well, we know, of course, no. If we if we haven't all along the way, we know that that's not true.
And the question is, how? How does a guy like Harvey Weinstein how does he keep showing up? He's basically my age. I grew up learning what was wrong with with that kind of man. Why didn't he learn it? And I think that one of the reasons is that through all of those years, men were being taught to be more sensitive and less sexist. At the same time, these images of unbridled's male working out of their own kind of fantasy lives on the bodies of women that just continue to take place. And we had our James Bonds in the sixties, and then we had our Tony Soprano's in the in the nineties, or in the office. So we kind of continued to have models of that kind of masculinity in front of us at all times, and I think that there's something very seductive about that. Freud would say that it's so that we can indulge in wish fulfillment fantasy all of the time, and one of the wishes is to be ultimately powerful and ultimately unanswerable to other people.
And so I was interested in looking at this basic narrative structure. The buddy narrative and how it reinforces keeps, keeps alive fantasies of male dominance is not always the issue. That is that I don't think that's what men are looking for In a lot of cases. I probably you know, in the case of something like Harvey Weinstein, it is about dominance. But for a lot of men, it's not about dominance. It's about having what you want with no consequences, something for nothing. That's the American dream anyway, and that also functions in the realm of sexuality.
Gender stereotypes are kind of kept alive through certain kinds of myth making, and I wanted to let these two characters run through what that all means. Frank is a guy who really would like to be a decent person. He really is trying to be a decent person at the same time that he's having these other ideas about what, how he might live. But he wants to be a decent person. He just is a little bit of a dope about it at one point. You know, I guess that this is not giving too much away. He falls in love with Dimitri's wife and decides that he's gonna rescue her. And he's completely unaware that rescue fantasy is itself completely misogynist fantasy. She doesn't want to be rescued. As it turns out, he remains blissfully unaware of that.
Mindy: You know, it's interesting you mentioned feminism and running into the attitude in classroom situations where people say, you know, we don't need it anymore. We're all equal. It's funny. I was in college and I remember being in a classroom where one of my teachers introduced herself and and said, you know that she was a feminist and a couple of people groaned and it was mostly boys And she was like, I want to inform all of you that you are feminists, too. She said, If you're sitting in here right now with these girls sitting next to you and you don't question that they have a right to be here in this room than you're actually a feminist.
Tom: Yes, You're the effects of the feminist before you. Yes, exactly.
Mindy: And it kind of blew all of their minds. And it was a lot of the girls were kind of hiding our smiles behind her hands. It was a good moment.
Tom: I should say to that, you know, I'm talking about the kind of idea content of this narrative that I really think that it's kind of just fun. What I really wanted to do was write what you know. Graham Greene called "an entertainment." I wanted it to be fun for readers, and part of that fun is indulging the fantasy life that I was talking about and what I'm hoping is that at some point you think - Oh, oh, I see. I see what what's happening here. I'm enjoying this in exactly the way that I probably shouldn't be. It's a multi layered experience. I hope.
Mindy: It's also the novel Born Slippy is also described as darkly comic, which is what you're angling at here. Um, that's a difficult thing to pull off. Dark humor is often misinterpreted. How do you go about approaching something as difficult as the topic from that angle of the dark humor? Because that's tough, especially in the, you know, the current climate.
Tom: Yeah, it is. And I think that I think I solved it by having Frank be a little bit out of it. The humor is dark, but he is not himself a cynical person. A lot of dark humor has a cynical protagonist who looks at the world in very dark ways and that can be tough to take over time and can wear on you. That you, you root for Frank. You think he's not a bad guy. He keeps being taken advantage of is funny, but not because he feels the darkness of the humor. It's partly that he's doesn't quite get that, that makes it funny.
Mindy: Lastly, why don't you let my listeners know where they can find you online?
Tom: I have a website now. Tom Lutz writer dot com It has, You know, it's about all of my different books, about Born Slippy. has a calendar of where I'm showing up for readings and that kind of thing.
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