Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…

Actually, the threatened winter storm started mildly (especially for those of us from the prairies where real winter lives), and held off until today. (It is snowing, but not at all bad as I type.) Nonetheless, the Royal York Hotel was booked up, as prudent partygoers chose to take a room and stay downtown rather than risking a tricky late night drive home.

The BLB is one of the great formal events of the year in Toronto, held in support of the Toronto Public Library system, which is, in fact, the busiest in the world. Tables are seriously expensive in a good cause, bought by corporations, banks, brokerages, businesses of one kind or another, with single seats going to … well, to book lovers who want to see authors in tuxedos and evening gowns. Here, just for the record, is one (1) ‘official photo’ proving that some of us can manage the dishevelled thing, even in a tux. My current theory is that dudes who consistently keep both tuxedo shirt wings under the bow tie are cheating with tape or velcro. Just sayin’…

There is a silent auction and cocktail reception beforehand, which is where you may actually get a chance to see people. The ballroom itself is huge, dark, and you are (mostly) at your tables, though people do wander in search of friends, or authors to talk to. Two of the sleek Penguin marketing mavens chased me down at mine, for example, to grin and repeat how obviously right they’d been to harass me into Twitter. Proof: the very first words of one of my table companions were, ‘I see you managed to get the bow tie on!’ (I had been joke-tweeting in the afternoon about my expected four hour wrestling bout with it.)

My table was an outright win (though I have to say I have always enjoyed the people I’ve been with at these). I sat with execs from the construction company and the architectural firm that built the magnificent Toronto Reference Library where, by coincidence (or not?) we are launching River of Stars in April. I talked about how splendid the central Atrium is for such events, the architect just grinned. I told a funny story ( well, I think it is funny!) from the Calgary Authors’ Festival. One senior executive told a story about being in L.A. and their very young waitress in a restaurant, learning she was from Canada, asked him where to see the Northern Lights. He tried to make clear how big this country is, but finally said she should go to Winnipeg in February and might have a shot (in fact, she really needed to go much farther north for best chance). He did add, ‘It is cold. It is really, really cold.’ And she said, ‘I get it. Like, an extra sweater?’ After, one of his table-companions in L.A. turned to him and said, ‘You realize, you have just sent that young woman to her death?’

The entertainment, as always at BLB featured ‘get everyones’ attention’ soundtracks and some seriously hard bodies of both sexes on stage (modelling agencies volunteer their people). But for River, as I mentioned here last week (scroll!) we were treated a performance by the genuinely extraordinary Liu Fang, one of the very greatest pipa artists in the world. (The pipa is often described as the Chinese lute.) She’d helped me with research for Under Heaven, we’ve kept in touch, and she agreed to come into town to participate in the fund raising and celebrate River of Stars. She brought class and grace and exceptinal talent to a version of ‘The Ambush’ which is probably the most celebrated and one of the most challenging pieces in the classical repertoire. Her husband, Risheng took a few photos (he took the one of me above, too). Here is the last image on the big screens of the very short video Penguin ran before the performance (full video is being shot this month):

And here are shots he took of Fang performing:

And this shows one of the screens and some of the crowd:

Here are Risheng and Fang, after her performance

I am so genuinely pleased that they came in to share in this. Video of her was shot, and with luck we’ll get the footage to edit into something that can be shared.

It was, as it always is, a good night, underpinned by an awareness that it is for a really good cause. It also felt, and this I hadn’t expected, as if this was the coming out party for River of Stars. Seeing it on the screen, listening to Fang perform… Plus being interviewed about an upcoming book while wearing a tuxedo is not normal. I could consider asking the marketing team if we want to make me in formal wear a ‘signature’ idea for the upcoming media gigs and readings and … no, scratch that thought.

I think it was 1986 that I met Duane Wilkins. If so, I was touring for The Darkest Road, but it might have been earlier, for The Wandering Fire. A long way back, in either case. I was in Vancouver, signing for Jill Sanagan and Walter Sinclair of White Dwarf Books.

After I read, and after the signing lineup had dwindled away, Jill introduced me to a tall ( a really tall, an absurdly tall) bookseller who, she said, had driven the 3-4 hours up from Seattle to get copies of my books personalized for his customers and have stock signed for his store. His store was the enormous University of Washington bookstore, and Duane was already emerging as one of the most genre-savvy booksellers in America.

He was really tall (I may have mentioned that) and he spoke incredibly softly, and he was a gentleman geek from toe to crown. He knew my books – he knew everyone’s books – and he had a lot of copies for me to sign. (Remember, this is right at the outset of my career.)

He came back north every time I was in Vancouver on tour, waited patiently till all attendees at a reading had their books signed, and then came forward with his boxes.

Eventually my tours started to lead me to Seattle (and will again this year, we just confirmed that). I signed for Duane at his own store, had dinners or coffees with him. He helped me buy a Waterman signing pen once, when I’d lost mine somewhere on the road. Always a gentleman, never started speaking louder, never got any shorter that I could tell. Became, through the years, one of the best-known bookselling figures in science fiction and fantasy.

I learned, very recently, from Shawn Speakman, an author who also runs ‘The Signed Page’ (a clever way to get books personalized for yourself from any author touring to Seattle), that Duane has just had some serious health issues and was in hospital for an intense stay. He’s recovering, he seems to be fine, but in the predictable American way (not going to get too political here) his insurance did not cover all the urgently required hospital fees and treatment. He went into debt because he got sick.

Shawn, who has dealt with even more acute health concerns, and was assisted by the always-generous sf/fantasy community, has started a pay-it-forward website at his Grim Oak Press site, whereby established authors will make special copies of books, ARCs, maps etc available for auction to raise money for members of the community who have endured financial reversals because of medical crises.

Duane Wilkins is the first beneficiary. I have offered a signed and personalized ARC of River of Stars, to be shipped to the auction winner immediately (in other words well ahead of publication date). If the winner also wants the signature of Martin Springett, the artist/musician who did the map for the book, Martin has graciously agreed to sign as well.

The auction begins today, and runs till next Friday, the 15th. My hope is that people find this ARC enough of a collectible (or are keen to get it early) to bid it up to a level where we help make a dent in the medical bills for a genuinely good person and a figure of longstanding importance in the genre. Here’s the site:

http://grimoakpress.com/auctions-2/signed-arc-river-of-stars-by-guy-gavriel-kay/

and you can click on ‘Auctions’ at the top, or this link

http://grimoakpress.com/auctions-2/

 to know more about the whole story.

This was kind of fun. I can affirm that my story, and my one-liner, are absolutely true. I told this anecdote long ago, on a two-person panel with Terry Pratchett, where we expected to be funny about the writing business. We set out to ‘one-down’ each other with publishing screw-ups. This one triumphed. Always good to make a gifted humourist laugh!

Some writers noted that they hug their books, or do a happy dance. My primal moment comes when I write the last words of a book, and there’s another, of sorts, when I have a printed manuscript and do the ‘it goes thump when you drop it on a table!’ thing.

(No, have not tried that with an iPad or Kindle.)

 http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2013/02/when-writers-meet-their-debut-books.html

A post-Super Bowl morning writing two essays and firing/whipping/lasering emails all over the place. This is where it gets complicated having three different publishers headed towards release of River of Stars. There are different issues in each market.

The essays aren’t for here, though I’ll signal where they end up. But Elena and Tanya of Wunderkind would defenestrate me if I didn’t do some writing for them to make use of. (Should post a photo of the window for the Defenestration of Prague. It was a weirdly great moment being in that room – and not being hurled out the window. It is a seriously long way down. No idea how the defenestratees survived, but apparently they did, layout of Prague Castle must have been different. Or – miracle!)

Why would good-hearted, nimble-minded publicists do violent things? Because they can? No, because this is part of what publicists do: they are working right now to set up ‘placement’ for some pieces by me, interviews, articles, in the period just before and after the book comes out. And although they push me stay busy here (don’t really need pushing, the Journal is a part of the process I actually enjoy – does it show?) they make sure I know that our marketing needs to ‘go wide’ as they say.

(San Francisco went too wide in that last goal line stand last night. Not happy with the play calling.)

So I’m writing the essays (one done, another started) on two completely different topics. One, actually, was suggested by Elena, and I am not even that suggestible. But she had a terrific, throwaway email query, a reader’s question not a publicist’s, and it started me thinking. (Not teasing about this, I will alert when I get it written and it pops up somewhere!)

Tomorrow is drinks with a magazine editor at new favourite bar in town. It puts me in a John Cheever state of mind: midday Old Fashioneds or Sazeracs at a long marble-top bar under a copper ceiling while the snow falls outside and winter dusk descends.

Wednesday, Liu Fang and her husband come into town for a dinner, then Thursday is the Book Lover’s Ball, where Fang is performing a piece to honour River of Stars. I wrote here last week (don’t be lazy, just scroll!) how pleased I am about that. I also just like the idea of the BLB: how can writers not support libraries, especially as so much is changing with them? It sometimes seems to me that I grew up in Winnipeg on the hockey rink at William Osler School or cycling to the River Heights Library. And I remember the same kind of inner buzz, anticipation, as I approached either of them. I did get thrown out of the library a few times (not defenestrated, mind you) for tripping or cross-checking people on the way to the New Arrivals rack. You can take the boy off the rink but …

I posted the full wrap of the Canadian (and essentially the American) cover of River of Stars this week, and people have been saying really nice things in various places. They’ve been saying that for awhile, since the front cover was posted some time back.

That, of course, is a compliment not to me, but to the artist and the art director. The art director, in fact, is a too-often-overlooked player in all this. A cover can be made or broken by their creativity. Not just in typeface and design, but in commissioning the right artist, and making the right use of the work delivered. (Sometimes only a detail of a painting is used, for example.)

We say two contradictory things on this subject. We say ‘don’t judge a book by…’ but we also say ‘I bought this book because I loved the cover.’ Even if we don’t verbalize it that way, research suggests that cover art plays a major role in book sales – even with online buying.

Given that this Journal is built aorund the idea of sharing info about the book world, I should say that one of the most often asked questions I get (and I suspect this is true of most writers) is, ‘How much input do you have in the covers?’

The predictable answer is: it varies. Some authors, like my friend Janny Wurts, are also painters and they will often do their own covers. (Janny also plays bagpipes, but we won’t go there.) Self-published writers will often be their own art directors, for better or worse. (Sometimes they can afford to hire someone.) Younger writers, working with an established house will rarely get too much in the way of consultation. (I used to warn younger friends that consultation means they have to ask your opinion before ignoring it.)

Once you get to a certain level, real consultation is more common but even then it is fraught and authors can get intensely frustrated. (So can publishers, to be fair.) It doesn’t help much to be ‘consulted’ if one’s first glimpse of a proposed cover comes so late in the production process the artist has no time to revise, let alone start again, or he or she wants more money to keep going. (This isn’t unreasonable, in many cases, by the way.)

I always ask (read: beg) to see cover ideas early in the process. With many of my editors by now I have really good working relationships and I have conversations with them before anything is even put together (before anyone else in the house has seen the manuscript). The editor is almost always the one who briefs the art director. ‘I see a 19th century British country house. Therevare stairs going up and down. There are pink zombies with ak47s, and pre-Raphaelite women and …’ (I just disturbed myself, actually.)

When it comes to foreign-language editions, most contracts (once you are reasonably senior) will provide for consultation as well, but communication and timeliness are even more of an issue, and there have been a few times when the first look I have had of a book is when actual copies arrive at my agents’. This doesn’t necessarily go well. A glance at the Art Gallery at brightweavings.com will reveal (expose?) a few of my … well, less-loved cover children.

On the other hand, I have been really lucky in my cover art here and in the States for the last several books and I love Larry Rostant’s cover for River of Stars. The editors wanted ‘big book’ as part of the underlying message, and I think they got that.

Subsequent editions (trade paperback, paperback) are likely to have very different covers, incidentally. That’s another post. But the mandates for initial hardcover and for reprints in paperback are very different. Paperbacks are still, for strictly economic reasons, much more of an impulse buy, and the covers try to take that into account.

I’ve just been told actual books will be in the warehouses first week in March. I will use ‘tangible’ here. (In-joke, from the Journal for Under Heaven.)

Yes, fine, I like puns. This is news?

The header is a riff on the fact that the linked image here, shows the full wraparound cover for River of Stars for the first time. I just got it. This will be the Canadian version – the American is likely to look identical in artwork but employ different quotes. This makes sense – the British will use different quotes again (and different cover art, too). Each market decides what works best in its territory. I just feel lucky there are such generous comments from which they can choose.

I also want to give a shout-out and thank you here to Larry Rostant, the artist responsible for a number of my current covers. Among others, he did the American and British Ysabel, the stunning green horse for Under Heaven, the beautiful new jackets in the States for the Mosaic pair, and now this genuinely gorgeous (well, the author thinks so) cover for River of Stars.

kay_riverofstars_hc

I did promise there might be a bit of news on Monday. And I’m able to announce, as it is online now.

This isn’t anything major, but it pleases me for a few reasons. Each February in Toronto the Book Lover’s Ball takes place. It is a black tie gala fundraiser for the Toronto Public Library system. There are 50 (very expensive) tables, mostly corporate commitments, and 50 authors (mostly not incorporated!) attend, one at each table. They do a red carpet, take classy photos (sometimes not so classy, the Toronto Star last year decided to be playful with lenses), auction items for a very good cause. It is an evening I’m always happy to be a part of.

The main BLB webpage is here:

http://www.bookloversball.ca

Each year they also offer entertainment inspired by 5 or 6 books by authors attending. This year they picked River of Stars as one of these.

http://www.bookloversball.ca/entertainment.html

That’s nice in itself, but then something even better happened. There’s a backstory.

When I was researching Under Heaven I came across a refernce to a historical change in the way the pipa was played (it is often called the Chinese lute here). I love bits of information like this. Some may recall a scene in Sailing to Sarantium where there is an argument about the best way to lay down a ‘setting bed’ for mosaic tesserae, the traditional one or something new. That was exactly the same thing, for me. A chance to do something with character and, er, setting by way of the debate and transition.

So in my slightly crazed fashion I started trying to find experts in the pipa who might tell me something about this. I came across the website of a performer named Liu Fang, Chinese-born and trained, living in Montreal, recording widely, hugely admired, and performing around the world.

I wrote her (of course) and she wrote me back a lovely email full of interesting information. We kept in touch. She and her husband/manager, Risheng, both read Under Heaven when it came out and were wonderfully enthusiastic about it. I bought her music (she sent me other CDs), we attended a concert of hers here in Toronto and met them both.

Long story shorter, I dropped her a note when the BLB people indicated they wanted to do ‘something’ this year with River of Stars. Usually Fang is in Europe in winter, and she will be by late February. But she’s in Canada before that, and said she’d be delighted to be part of the gala fundraiser and to be connected to River of Stars. I put the BLB showrunners in touch with them, everyone clicked and coordinated, and on February 7th, Liu Fang will be coming into Toronto to perform a solo pipa number at the Book Lover’s Ball in honour of River of Stars.

I couldn’t be happier about all this. She an exquisite performer, a truly classy person, and the number she’s chosen is just perfect for evoking the book. None opf this counts as ‘major news’ but sometimes the book world gives you connections and moments that feel just right, seriously cool, and this looks to be one of them. We’re hoping to be able to get a recording that night, to share.

Her website is here. Listen to what she can do on the pipa and the guzheng. There’s a video of a concert she gave in St Petersburg recently, too.

http://www.liufangmusic.net/English/

Many people have asked, but I’ve been waiting (which is proper, really) for my UK publishers to finalize our timing and details, and that happened today.

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Titles/83820/river-of-stars-guy-gavriel-kay-9780007521906

HarperCollins UK will publish River of Stars on July 18. But – and this will please and interest some people here, I know – they will lead with the e-book edition on April 2 … the same date River comes out in Canada and the States. With the increasingly interconnected book buying world, it just make sense for a publisher to have their electronic edition out when others do.

The trade paperback edition for Australia (and other territories) will also be out in April, with the same cover the Americans and Canadians are using. This timing is dictated by Australian law now, as I have mentioned before. Australia became tired, many years ago, of being included in UK rights sales, but then not getting books till long after they were available everywhere else. They mandate now that actual physical books needed to be on sale there within (I think it is) six weeks of appearance anywhere else in English, or else Australia will be an ‘open territory’ and other publishers (from the US, normally) are free to sell their editions there.

The July timing in the UK is interesting, and I am onside with it. They are planning a new cover, and a shift of imprints, from my current Voyager to one where authors like Tracy Chevalier are published. Part of a strategy to position the book for literary/historical/mainstream readers, in addition to the core of fantasy readers.

I have always (my own stubbornness!) been challenging to slot or categorize. I know this. In fact I hated the tendency to force books into categories even before I was a writer! (Seriously, the first award-winning student paper I ever wrote was a near-rant on absurdities underlying The Classification of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ … a commercial bestseller theme if ever there was one!) But this category-issue has forced my publishers in different markets and different languages to work harder (and involving very different ideas, sometimes) to try to find the books access to readers who might well be excited by them — if they learned about the novels. (That’s a reason the covers are often so different, too.)

My own solution? Everyone hanging out here go off and tell people! Come back when you are done and we’ll play beach volleyball and toast marshmallows. (It is really cold here, I am fantasizing.)

And though that’s flippant (moi?) it is still, for me, the key, core, definitive way readers come to books: word of mouth. Whether it is a librarian or a trusted bookseller, a blogger, newspaper or online reviewer, a friend, a sibling or parent or child, or the person sitting across from you on the bus who looks up crying from a book and says, seeing you looking, ‘It’s great. You have to read him!’

That’s what’ll ultimately sell books. Though, I am currently conducting an experiment to see if puns on Twitter play a role.

But I am always grateful, when my publishers bring innovation and imagination to the process. I’ll get the new UK cover up as soon as we have it, of course, and will fill in other details as they emerge.

Oh. A Terrible Tease: should have something else fun to share on Monday, maybe Tuesday.

The title is a riff on a poem by Wallace Stevens. (I had lunch last week with the woman translating him into Chinese, which was pretty cool.)

My very clever UK agent, Jonny Geller, tweeted today about starting a fee-for-service business of chasing authors off Twitter and back to work, said he’d do it for other agents, and charge them. We shared an email and a laugh about it. (I lost some time yesterday to a much-too-much-fun volley of puns about wine, after finding a Slate magazine piece describing someone with a glass of wine in hand ‘pouring over a map of Game of Thrones‘ instead of ‘poring’. Ouch! I said the map would have more ‘clarety’ after that. Ouch, encore.)

Every generation has its sins in the eyes of the older generation. Sinatra then Elvis, then the Beratles (not to mention the bad boy Rolling Stones) led straight to sex. Movies, D&D, computer games, texting on smart phones … Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. All pernicious distractions from right thinking and diligent work. (We are not discussing fantasy baseball here. Don’t go there! Though I will note that my league is called Stan the Man, and the great, great Musial died last week and is being quite properly mourned. Class act.)

By the way, I do not deny that technology can and does change us and how we relate to and function with each other. My go-to book on this, one I urge on everyone, is Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, where the Gershwin title says so much about us today.

I did a radio interview a year or two ago with the great Shelagh Rogers and another author, promoting a fundraising book for PEN Canada in which we both had essays. We were discussing the ‘online’ question, as it applied to writers. He lamented the disappearance of the ‘sacred space’ for creativity, due to the seductions of the Internet. I don’t use language that mystical, but I agreed completely that the difference between today and the days when a writer avoiding work would wander down to the cafe or bar is that today our work space is identical to our play space. And I added something else: despite my own agent’s teasing, most publishers and agents want their authors promoting themselves all over social media (we’ve been discussing that here).

I’m not as sublimely sure as Elena Ferrante (see last post) that quality will always emerge, whether in a few years or posthumously. I think our sped-up culture can very very easily cause something to be lost. I dislike it. I don’t like the extreme convergence of author and work, but I do see it as a core element of today’s book world. So I allowed myself to be lured on to Twitter by the tandem Sirens of Penguin (they even have Penguin Canada’s publisher out there now, though her corporate role will make it hard for her to be funny and casual). And I also find myself laughing a lot at the back and forths, over and above steering people to things I find interesting – or disturbing.

It is easier for me to hang out in this way right now as I am in the very first ‘incubation’ stages of sorting what might be a next book. One reason I am slow is that I always feel the need to let the last book fade before starting to properly address a next one. I don’t want language and themes to ‘bleed’ from one to another (I don’t mind if that overlap of themes happens because it feels interesting). And so this is the ‘marketing stage’ and that process has changed a lot … which is something I’m trying to share here.

Received the first two sets of email interview questions for pieces that will appear online on two websites. The publicity teams will sort out timing. I am also trying to figure something out, maybe people here have thoughts. I did a very enjoyable AMA on Reddit last year, typing as fast as I could to reply to funny/smart questions. We’ll do another this spring. Here’s the dilemma, and it was the author Brandon Sanderson who posted something and started me thinking about this.

Should we do it just as the book comes out and make it a wide open, general discussion, or wait a few weeks for epople to buy and read River of Stars and set up (as Sanderosn says he’ll do) a Spoiler Zone AMA where anyone there that night (or reading the transcript after) is on notice that questions will be about the new book?

One complication: predictably, I dislike over-explaining. I often avoid spelling things out in interviews, I don’t want to take away the reader’s ability to shape their own response to the text.

For example, I never have (and never will) address the last sentence of Tigana!

I’m delegating part of this post to two very funny pieces I found. One is recent, in Salon, the other is a 3 years old bit I love, from the New Yorker. Both are about book marketing.

The older one, first:

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/10/19/091019sh_shouts_weiner

I sent this to all my publicists and marketing people back when, with urgent assurances I did love them and I didn’t think the industry was bailing on writers this much, but … it was still killingly funny. From the first two sentences on.

The second is in a long tradition of Author Tour From Hell accounts. This paradigm is actually what I used to inspire my first Tour Journal, years ago … the idea that I might try to be both funny and informative, in sharing the stages of how a book got out there on bookstore shelves (e-books as a major alternative were a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye back then). Evoking some of the pieces I’d read when young about authors on the road.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/hell_is_my_own_book_tour/

This is a very funny addition to the tour disaster canon. I almost did a follow-up tweet about it, but Twitter is tricky. Brevity means you lose the space to make clear what you are not doing. I don’t remotely want to needle Mansbach (who wrote the linked piece). I loved his riff, winced and laughed. But it has occurred to me, thinking about this, and my own Journal posts: if publisher-funded author tours are dying out – and they are – does it become a humblebrag to talk about the chaos and fumbling associated with your own? I’m big enough to be having a disaster tour?

Or, as I do here, to be writing about aggravations with overseas contracts or sorting out a book video, or a day spent with a (patient!) production editor reviewing the last stages of a manuscript (when most people don’t get that chance)? I hold to the notion that I can (sometimes) be amusing and (sometimes) informative about a subject most readers don’t get to glimpse, and seem to enjoy seeing, but –

I worry about it. I think, often, about the whole process whereby our culture foregrounds the artist as least as much as the art. We write about our parents and pets, we share cute kid pictures, or our favourite scotches and coffee brands. And people seem to want this. But if I start reflecting now about privacy I’ll be getting into Jodi Foster country (and I am not retiring, not lonely, and I loathe Mel Gibson).

But here’s another quote I saw this week, from an Italian novelist, Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym), profiled in the New Yorker. She’s highly regarded, not prolific, not anything like a commercial name. At the outset of her career she wrote to her publisher (as quoted by James Wood):

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t … Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.

Wow, one might say, suavely. There’s someone willing to take the long, long view.