Podcast: PEN / Sol Literary Magazine Reading Series, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Stone of Kings, Spiritist Manual

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN to the new podcast:

Gerard Helferich, author of Stone of Kings: In Search of the Lost Jade of the Maya, and C.M. Mayo (Yours Truly), translator of Francisco I. Madero's secret book of 1911, Spiritist Manual. Introduced by Eva Hunter, editor of Sol Literary Magazine. Recorded on February 22, 2012 in the café of Biblioteca Pública, San Miguel de Allende. *57 minutes.

(My talk starts at 26:36. You'll notice background noise throughout; the café had a burpy-slurpy cappuccino maker and, next door, a well-attended kindergarten. But the microphone for the readers seemed loud enough.)

More podcasts:

>All C.M. Mayo podcasts (master list)

>Conversations with Other Writers, an occasional series
So far: Sara Mansfield Taber, Solveig Eggerz, Rosemary Sullivan

>Podcasts for Writers (tips and more)

>Marfa Mondays Project 2012-2013: Exploring Marfa, Texas & Environs in 24 Podcasts
One podcast per month until the end of 2013. The most recent: Charles Angell in the Big Bend. Up next: Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony.

>The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire
Includes my lecture at the Library of Congress and the Historical Society of Washington

>Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico
Some excerpts about Bob van Wormer and the Jesuits in San Ignacio

>Mexico: A Literary Traveler's Companion
A reading of the prologue (a good basic introduction, if I do say myself, to contemporary Mexican writing)

So, yeah, I am totally into podcasts! I'll be offering a workshop on podcasting for writers at the Writer's Center, near Washington DC, this summer (details to be announced), and meanwhile, after our chat in San Miguel de Allende last week, novelist Sandra Gulland spilled the beans over at her blog. Merci beaucoup, amiga!

My Excellent (If Occasionally Head-Banging) E-Book Adventure

What do best-selling historical novelist Sandra Gulland, marketing guru Seth Godin, genre-writer Joe Konrath, spirituality writer Mare Cromwell, goddess and tarot expert Kris Waldherr, and Kevin (What Technology Wants) Kelly have in common? They've all made a foray into the swashbuckling and glitch-ridden landscape of self-publishing e-books. Add Yours Truly to the growing list. No, I have not abandoned my publishers, but I am publishing some of my own e-books.



In 2009, when Unbridled Books published the hardcover edition of my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, they didn't waste more than a moment before bringing out the e-book. It was news in 2009, though it isn’t anymore: the e-book market is exploding. And what of my other books? Like the above-mentioned writers, with several books published more than a few years ago, I own the digital rights because my various publishers didn't care to keep them or, going further back in time, didn't even contemplate them in their contracts. I figured, how difficult can it be to upload an e-book? So I expanded my writing workshop company, Dancing Chiva, into publishing and, voila: a catalog of e-books.



Miraculous Air, my memoir of travels through Mexico's nearly 1,000 mile-long Baja California peninsula, is the one I am most delighted to have been able to turn into an e-book. Based on my travels in the late 1990s, it's a book I put both shoulders and heart into, and even now, more than a decade later, I think it's one of the best things I've written. Originally published in hardcover by University of Utah Press, and still in print in a paperback edition from Milkweed Editions, it has found many readers over the years but, I know, travel books are the most fun to read en route, yet, with suitcase space at a premium, even the most avid readers often pass them up. Got a Kindle? Problem solved.



But preparing e-books-- as Kevin Kelly's blog posts should have warned me-- has not been as easy as I anticipated. First, one has to prepare an absolutely clean unformatted Word doc, a tedious and frustrating task when it comes to a nearly 500 page book originally written in Wordperfect. (True, for a fee, I could have farmed out that job, but I wanted to learn how this works.) It turns out that, though one can convert a Wordperfect to a Word doc easily, when it then goes through the program for e-books, the punctuation comes out all whichwaysly wacky. (What to do with a 500 page manuscript where every dash is now a question mark?!) Then, the programs for converting Word docs to Kindle are riddled with glitches: figuring out how to address these required many hours with my computer coach (bless you, Rubén Pacheco). Then, there are more decisions than turn-offs on the highway through LA: ISBN? Tags? Which comes first, the Kindle or the Nook? PDF or iBook? How to navigate amazon.com, itunes, and etc? Which program to use for the cover? Cover image? Font? What to do with the maps?! What price?



And now, publicity. Ayyy... Buy my books here. Read all about Miraculous Air. Kindle version of Miraculous Air here.



In sum, I have been getting an all new appreciation for the multifaceted and time-consuming work publishers do. What I want to do is, um, write.



But here's the elephant: sometimes, for some books, a traditional publisher is not the answer. And nor are brick-and-mortar bookstores. As I told Jada Bradley in a recent interview for inReads.com:

"There are several works I want to publish but that I know are not commercial, so in attempting to place them with an agent or directly with a publisher, I would be wasting my time and theirs. But I believe in these works; I know they have readers, relatively few as they may be. For example, this November, I am publishing my translation— the first into English– of Francisco I. Madero’s Spiritist Manual. Mexican historians have written about this unusual and little-known work, and it certainly deserves to be brought out in English with a proper introduction. Why not for its centennial?"

Later this year I will also be publishing an e-book edition of a very unusual memoir of 1860s Mexico, from the Bancroft Library, Marie de la Fere's My Recollections of Maximilian. In writing my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, I came upon this and several other works (most in the public domain) that I would love to be able to bring out of the musty back shelves of libraries and share; with Dancing Chiva, I now have the platform to do it.



Similarly, my essay, "From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion," about a journey to the Emperor of Mexico's castle in Trieste, Italy, is not, on its own, long enough to interest a traditional book publisher. (They prefer to publish books with spines.) But there are people interested in Maximilian and Trieste, and willing to pay a small fee, thank you very much, to download the e-book.



Nonetheless, when I have a new novel, believe me, I will send it to Unbridled Books because they know how to get reviews, get the book out of the haystack and into quality bookstores. We can't be all things to all people. Time is scarce. As someone who writes, I am glad indeed that there are people out there who want to take manuscripts and turn them into books, and then find those books readers.



So what would I advise other writers about self-publishing their e-books? There's no formula; what's right for one writer with one title, might be different for a different writer or a different title. First, check in with your intentions. Second, make a realistic assessment of the costs and benefits. (I have more to say about intentions here.)



Alas, a realistic assessment of costs and benefits is not easy. My own experience, including my recent adventures in e-book publishing, has shown me that writers tend to underestimate the amount of work publishers do.



Though publishing e-books has been more time-consuming than I anticipated, knowing what I know now, I would still bring my older books into digital editions under my own imprint and publish works I believe in but that would not appeal to a traditional publisher. On the other hand, I want to spend most of my time writing, so when it makes sense for me and for them, I will continue to work with established publishers. But when it doesn't make sense, how wonderful to be able to publish what I want to publish! The amazing thing is, this is true now for anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and the determination to do it.





SURF ON:



Deborah Batterman, "Self Publish(?) or Perish: 5 Links on the New Digital Imperative"



Daniel Crown, "The E-Reader Boom Begins"



Kevin Kelly (of Wired fame) on Screenpublishing



Kindle Direct Publishing video tutorial and step-by-step instructions



Novelist Sandra Gulland, "E-Books: Feast or Famine for Writers?"



Novelist Nina Vida, "How One Writer is Riding the E-Book Revolution"



Seth Godin, "You Should Write an Ebook"



Joe Konrath "What Works: Promo for Ebooks"



Nate Hoffelder, "Vook Explains Why $3, $4 or even $9.99 Isn't Always the Best Price for an eBook"



Christian Harder, "E-Reader Reality Check: 4 Limitations to Consider"



C.M. Mayo, "At Play in the Fields of Keynote: A note on designing e-book covers"

Susan Coll's 5 Favorite Comic Novels

The best novelists are sociologists with a wicked sense of humor. In her widely celebrated novels Beach Week, Acceptance, and Rockville Pike, my amiga Susan Coll has upward-striving suburbia nailed. This month Picador has released the paperback edition of Beach Week, so click on through and get your chuckles. Here's what this master of the genre has to say about some of her own comic reading. Over to you, Susan.

Now there is a pig in this world named “Super Sad True Love Story,” the thought of which is nearly as funny as Gary Shteyngart’s self-same novel, winner of this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. It’s encouraging to see an American--even one who came by way of Russia--win this award, which usually goes to a Brit. A few pages into Super Sad it occured to me that this book does have something of a British sensibility in that Shteyngart's humor relies on the mortification of his male protagonist. This got me thinking about my favorite comic novels--or at least books that had me doubled over in laughter, and I have to confess that the British do seem to have a lock on the sort of droll, dark humor that typically does me in. As do, apparently, men--which is at least the sort of observation that helps get me out of bed and to my keyboard each morning.

1. Our Man in Havana, By Graham Greene (1958), in which a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba is pressed into service by British intelligence to hilarious effect, and which, I only just learned from Wikipedia, was made into not just a film but an opera and a play.

2. Burmese Days, by George Orwell (1934), which you can read free, on-line, and which amazon describes as a mix of E.M. Forster and Jane Austen. “Stir in a bit of socialist doctrine, a sprig of satire, strong Indian curry, and a couple quarts of good English gin and you get something close to the flavor . . .”

3. A Good Man in Africa, by William Boyd (1982), about a hapless British diplomat in a fictitious African country in the fledgling days of independence. I wrote about this last summer for NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126501855

4. The Wimbledon Poisoner, by Nigel Williams (1994), a suburban comedy about a man who tries to murder his wife. Confession: I read this so long ago that really all I remember is my own hysterical laughter. While I can’t vouch for how well it holds up, I can tell you who borrowed my book and failed to give it back, so perhaps you can consult with him.

5. Memories of the Ford Administration, by John Updike (1992). Odd that Updike, not known for his comedy, should be the token American on my list. I worked up the nerve to approach him at a conference many years ago, and told him how much I loved this novel. He seemed surprised, and said something about having almost forgotten writing it. I later told this to a book critic who scoffed and said, “minor Updike.” Minor Updike! The definition of an oxymoron? Or the fate, too often, of comic fiction?

--- Susan Coll

---> For the archive of Madam Mayo guest blog posts, click here.
Previous guest-blogger novelists include Janice Eidus; Sandra Gulland; Daniel Olivas; Leslie Pietrzyk; Joanna Smith Rakoff; and Porter Shreve.