How I decide what to tell other people about

First, have y'all been to the Google website? It's musical today, and you can record your own little diddy. Check it out!

I've been oddly lucky this week to have won two of the two blog contests I entered. I'll be receiving Tess Hilmo's With A Name Like Love and Beth Revis' Across the Universe. I was already excited about getting WANLL because I really admire Tess' writing, and I already have a copy of ATU. But having two copies of each will let me pass on one copy to some other reader--or let me read two copies at once.

The duplicates got me thinking about how I decide which books/things I tell other people about. It's more complicated than me simply liking the book.

Over the last year or so, I'd say there were 3 things that I really pushed. These are the things that I told many of my friends about, that I tweeted about, that I blogged about, etc. One was the Not So Humble Pie blog, which now has over 3500 followers. I think I was one of the first 10 to follow it, but I'm not going to click through them all to find out for sure. This blog talks about baking and also has a lot of really beautiful pictures of the products. I remember passing images around and telling my friends about it, as almost all of my friends eat.

The second thing I told a lot of people about was a television show called Raising Hope. I just thought it was hilarious, and I wanted to make sure it stayed on the air.

And the third recent thing I told people about was a band called Foster The People, which, really, if you haven't already heard them, you should.

Why did I decide to talk about these things? Well, I liked them all. That was definitely an important criterion, but it wasn't the only one. After all, I also found this guy on YouTube after watching Bjork perform "Unison" about three hundred times, which was something else I really liked. I even contacted the YouTube singer and had a short exchange about what inspired us in art. He's really nice.

I realize that I tell people about some things more than others because I have to figure out how to communicate my message to the people I think will care, and some things are easier to talk about than other things. It's much easier for me to say, "You can dance to Foster The People" than it is to say, "This guy's cool because he covered a Bjork song, and has a really simple and elegant voice and accompanies himself with a soprano saxaphone." I don't feel like I can properly sell the second guy in a way that will motivate people to check him out.

So, it's a two step process. I have to like something, and I have to know how to sell that something to the people who might like it. And a lot of things get lost in the process. The strange and sad result is that I keep the things I like the most to myself sometimes.

Let's talk books.

Here are some books I have loved in the last few months: Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Never Let Me Go, Too Much Happiness, Moby Dick.

Here are some books I have pushed on people in the last few months: The Lovely Bones, Water For Elephants, The Book Thief, Never Let Me Go.

There's an overlap, but for the most part, the two lists are different. For the second group of books, I had to feel like I knew people who would like the product I was trying to sell.

For me, then, there has to be some sort of short message associated with the project that teaches me how to talk about it. I don't think that short message has to be about plot or about character or anything specific. But it does have to be about something. As part of my new journey to match writers with their Right People Readers then, my challenge is to figure out how to come up with those messages so that I can get more of the books I love into the right hands.

And, I should say, that I'm not always right about my predictions ahead of time, so maybe it's just a matter of me trying to communicate what I love, even if I don't feel like I know how to sell it. Have you checked out the YouTube singer I mentioned? Did I manage to sell him?

So tell me--and yes, this is for selfish reasons--what makes you tell other people about a book?

And also...
Oh, and also also, February Grace interviewed me here, and Tara Maya put up my first official book review here.

Who Cares if You Blog?

Today I ran across the blog of an aspiring novelist. This writer doesn't have a lot of "followers" and mentioned some worry about how a lack of internet presence might hurt chances of getting attention from agents or publishers. I have some thoughts about this. Now, I don't have a publisher but I do have an agent and I know some published authors and the thing is, if you write fiction, having a blog or not has no influence on your chances of getting an agent or getting published. As my agent says, your blogging will only impress people if you have like 25,000 readers (that's not a typo; I mean twenty-five thousand), otherwise you're just another person with a blog, and we all have blogs and it's nothing special. What is special is writing a good book. So focus on that, because the average reader doesn't read blogs by writers and real agents and editors aren't cruising the internets looking at writing blogs hoping to find something dazzling (they have day jobs and that's what they do all day).

Just write a good book and don't worry about the blogging. Unless, of course, you are an ass on the internets. Because if an agent or editor is interested in the dazzling book you've written, they'll likely Google you and if you look like a difficult person with whom to work, the odds are that they'll pass on your book because, you know, there are 100 people right behind you with books just as dazzling (in their eyes) as yours is, so why wouldn't they rather work with those nice folks than you?

So write a good, dazzling book and be nice on the internets but otherwise remember that blogging--at least according to my best-selling author friends--doesn't sell books and you shouldn't expect it to and it's not, you know, a big deal. Blogging is not the Real World. Look away from your computer screen. See all of that stuff? That's the Real World. Keep blogging and have fun with it and meet lots of cool people on the internets and play nicely together, but remember that it's just the internets and if you want to be a writer, concentrate on writing a cool book, not on writing a cool blog. Because the cool book is what matters.

Also: Apologies to Lady Glamis, because this is her day to post and I've totally hijacked the Lab even though I am still officially on blogcation and I wasn't here and you didn't see me.

Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant: I Need to Learn How to Network

Do you network? Can you network? Every week I'm trying to keep you posted on my road to publishing my novel. Last night I went to a reading with Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant at the Village Voice Bookstore in Paris. Lahiri is one of my favorite living authors, and both of them write extroadinary short stories. Only the addition of Alice Munro could have made it a better night. Lahiri was cool and poised as she explained that 87-year-old Gallant was one of her heroes and the person who inspired her to write the three linked stories in Unaccustomed Earth. She read a section of the first of those stories and Gallant read two beautiful and hilarious pieces that got the entire audience blushing. One of them involved an erotic escapade with the entire English army. It was a great night, and I had the opportunity to give Lahiri a few stuttering compliments.

But, I'm left wondering if there was anything I could do to make a better or bigger impression on Lahiri. After all, I love her writing, and I think we have the same literary goals of creating dramatic and character-based universal stories. Having Lahiri read my book, even if she thought it was bad, would be an incredible experience. And, if she liked it, maybe she would offer a blurb or an introduction to her agent, Eric Simonoff, who is one of my dream agents. (I'm waiting for more feedback on my novel and query before I submit to him.) And yet, I didn't mention any of this to Lahiri. And, maybe I shouldn't have. I'm sure she gets requests like that all the time and they probably drive her bananas. But, a charming person, a witty person, probably could have come up with something that opened doors without being offensive. We all know someone like this, right? The one that just happens to be jogging when she finds Cormac McCarthy's hat and ends up getting invited to hang out with him in his think tank? Or, the one who loves reading about dung beatles and discovers that Don Delillo also loves reading about dung beatles? I've never been good at networking. I avoid large gatherings and I tremble around people I admire. Yet, here I am with a novel, trying to figure out how I can get it published. So, can a shy person learn to network? And, is networking essential to getting that dream blurb or agent or editor? At least I got to see these two amazing writers in person.