So last year I wrote a novel about my worst fear: the death of bookstores. The story came to me in a flash, in response to something that was happening around me at that very moment, but for a few months I fought against the idea of writing it. I'm a nonfiction writer, with four books on the shelf and fifth one in the works. Surely jumping into fiction would be a risky career move at this point.
But the fact is that when I'm not doing research for one of my own books, I read nothing but novels. I was that kid who always wanted to be a writer when she grew up, and it was not nonfiction that inspired me. It was fiction. So eventually I decided to quit fighting the impulse. I cleared my schedule and gave myself a little time to write a novel. I didn’t tell anyone—not my agent, not my editor. I didn’t write a book proposal or seek out a book contract. I didn’t worry about the marketing plan. I just wrote.
And it was glorious. Delicious and delirious and intoxicating. Here’s what I loved about it: when you write fiction, you get to make stuff up. For me, as a nonfiction writer wedded to facts and research, that felt risky and transgressive. I wrote for several hours every day, thinking all the while, "Can I really do this?" If I got bored with a character, I could drive him off a cliff. If I hated the house I'd constructed for one of my characters to live in, I could burn it down. Being a character in a novel-in-progress, I realized, is dangerous business: mine were subjected to sex changes, disastrous love affairs, and run-ins with the law, all because I wanted to test the limits of my new-found power.
Really, it was amazing. There was no fact-checking, no deadline, and no contract to fulfill. Just the sheer joy of telling a story that delighted the hell out of me. And because I was working in complete obscurity, I didn’t even worry about whether it was any good. I just wrote.
*
The idea for the novel came to me one afternoon as I was sitting around in the antiquarian bookstore my husband and I had just purchased. A winter storm was pounding the Pacific coast that day. We hadn't seen a customer in hours. We could barely see across the street. Our bookstore felt like a creaky old ship lost at sea. I had given up on busywork; I was slumped in a chair watching the rain. "It feels like we are the last bookstore in America," I said.
"That should be the name of the novel," Scott said.
And, to pass the time, we started idly constructing a plot. Why would it be the last bookstore in America? What happened to all the other bookstores?
Well, maybe our worst fears came true and the e-book killed the printed page. Killed it quickly and easily, the way people abandoned vinyl for CDs and CDs for mp3s. Forget the long, slow, confusing struggle we are actually involved in right now as we grapple with the future of the book in the digital age. What if people mostly decided that they loved the idea of reading a book on computer? What if the book simply vanished, and now there were only a few of those ancient relics called bookstores left?
As a bookstore owner myself, it's a terrifying prospect. I mortgaged my house to buy this store. I'm a member of the American Booksellers Association. My husband is a rare book dealer, and I'm a writer whose livelihood depends on books and bookstores. No one wants books to survive more than I do. But that’s what makes it interesting. Why not go to the dark side? If my worst fear is a world in which bookstores cease to exist—well, that's the story I ought to write.
Then we had another problem. Why would this particular bookstore --- this imaginary bookstore that is still hanging on -- why would it still be open?
Scott and I thought about it for a minute and then I said, "Well, if the bookstore in this novel is going to be set in Humboldt County, I know how it's keeping its doors open. It's selling pot." Seems like every mariginal business on the North Coast turns out to be a front for a pot grower. So why not a bookstore?
Marijuana is a driving economic force in this part of the world. The debate over legalization is a constant murmur in coffee shops and at City Hall. Will legalization really turn us into the Napa Valley of pot? Or would tobacco companies steal our best varieties and replace their fields of Nicotiana tabacum with Cannabis sativa, driving the little guys out of business?
That was a book I could not wait to write. Juxtaposing the future of the book and bookstores against a battle over a very wicked plant would let me play around with two issues that are in my life constantly. There would be independent pot growers and independent booksellers. There would be computers and corporations. There would be the ascent of one product and the descent of another. And it would all be set in my weird and idiosyncratic hometown.
*
So writing the novel was a delight. It was more fun than I've ever had writing a book. But now what? Should I treat it as a lark, something that entertained me for a few months but should never see the light of day? Or should I try to get published, even though I have no track record writing fiction?
A few friends offered to read the manuscript. They made some helpful suggestions that I think improved the story. Mostly, they said they loved the book and urged me not to put it in a drawer and forget about.
Of course, the problem with having your friends read your manuscript is that if they know you and love you, they’re more likely to love whatever you do. That's why we have friends, after all. It would be much better to get feedback from strangers, but strangers are, by definition, people you don't know. That makes it a little hard to track them down. What was I supposed to do, put the manuscript in plain brown envelopes and send them to ten random addresses across the country? (Actually, that's an interesting idea.) But I decided I needed a professional opinion.
So eventually I worked up my nerve and sent the manuscript off to my agent and my editor. My agent doesn't represent much fiction; she encouraged me to find another agent for fiction and continue working with her for nonfiction. But my publisher had an option on my next book anyway, so we sent the manuscript to them. Six weeks later, the answer I got back was some version of, “We loved it, but…”
But we’re not sure bookstores will want to sell a book about the end of bookstores.
But we think readers will be put off by the marijuana subplot.
But the notion of a bookstore selling pot seems too improbable.
But the legalization of marijuana is also hard to believe.
But we just don’t quite love it enough to publish it.
I tried to marshal some facts and convince them. I said that it was not an anti--bookstore book. Writing a book about the death of bookstores might be dark and transgressive, but I was pretty sure that booksellers were smart enough to distinguish fact from fiction. It's a story. Sometimes bad things happen in stories.
And as for marijuana, well, 35 million Americans can't be wrong. The United States has the same number of golfers as it does pot smokers. That doesn't stop anybody from publishing books about golf.
But. The answer was still no.
I had my answer, and now I had a choice. I could look for a new agent and a new publisher, a process that could take six months or more, and then edit the book and get it ready for publication in, say, 2011 or 2012. The problem was, the longer I waited, the more the speculative elements of my novel were starting to come true. The issues I was writing about—the digitization of books and the transformation of the book industry, as well as debates over marijuana and tobacco—were playing themselves out in the news every day.
The e-book device that I invented for my novel -- a gadget that could read books in any voice, in any language, and could also monitor your blood pressure and control your home security alarm --- was starting to look more and more like a cross between a Kindle and an iPhone. The Netflix-meets-iTunes model I envisioned in my novel -- a subscription service that allows a fixed number of e-book downloads per month --- was starting to get Twittered about.
And pot? California assemblymember Tom Ammiano introduced a bill to legalize it in California, and president Obama had to take questions about it in town hall meetings. The FDA was getting ready to regulate tobacco. This book could not wait. Who knew how relevant it would be when it finally came out in two years?
So I decided to put it out into the world now—right now—and find out what readers think. Consider this its beta release. It’s available on the Kindle and through Scribd, a document-sharing site that allows anyone to read a book on their computer or mobile device. If there’s interest in a print version, I might make that available, too.
The goal is to get your feedback on a work-in-progress and to invite you to be a part of a discussion about the future of the book and the future of author-reader interactions. I invite your comments about all of it—the novel itself, the issues it raises, and the entire process of writing a book in a more transparent way, with reader feedback at every step.
*
Technology is forcing publishing to change. I’m not sure that all those changes are going to be good for literature, but I do know that it’s a good time for some lively experimentation. And I’m interested in experimenting with being more involved with readers at a much earlier point in the process.
Usually a writer is asked to stay quiet about her work-in-progress until the publisher announces its release. Unlike movies that get screened before test audiences, books are usually edited in isolation, with no one but the author and the editor involved. Usually the decisions about a book’s title, its cover, are made by a small group of people in New York.
So what if readers could be a part of that process?
It’s intriguing and a little terrifying.
But I’m letting you in. Starting now. Welcome!
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