Hill House

 I've been on a bit of a Shirley Jackson journey lately, mostly because I'm teaching We Have Always Lived in the Castle in the context of Jackson's female gothic. Also, I'm a sucker for anything New England gothic having written my own nonfiction volume on the history of Danvers State Hospital. I'm currently watching the 1999 version of The Haunting and hoping to finish the Netflix version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle with the kids on Monday as their semester ends Thursday. Because of the trials and tribulations of remote learning, we haven't been able to go quite as deep as I hoped.

Despite all the COVID restrictions and the fact that I haven't left my house since...well...last March, our library has begun doing curbside pickup and it's become something of an addiction for me so this week I picked up Susan Scarf Merrell's Shirley, a novelized imagining of Shirley's life told from the point of view of their young houseguest, Rose, whose professor husband has accepted a position working with Shirley's husband Stanley at Bennington College. 

I really, truly wanted so much more out of this book which was adapted to film in early 2020 starring Elizabeth Moss as Shirley. The movie was exceptionally well done but the book itself was equally disappointing. I had a hard time buying the fictional Shirley. While I clearly never met her, I've read enough about her and enough written by her to have a solid idea of what Shirley Jackson might have been like. In this novel, she's painfully unlikeable and very much a slave to domestic life. Where she did indeed wind up trapped in domesticity, she did not sit back and accept her lot. She rebelled in her writing and against her husband. Instead, this book portrays her as a woman who has given up, given in to her husband's proclivities for cheating with his students. The narrator of the story, Rose, is equally difficult to empathize with. She idolizes Shirley, which of course is understandable, but she also lets Shirley bully her and push her around. When Rose finally makes an attempt at writing something of her own, Shirley chastizes her and essentially tells her that writing is her sin, her calling-- not Rose's. 

I'll admit that I found myself simply skimming a good deal of the book. There was too much tell without much show and the endless narration became tedious and did very little to move the plot (of which there wasn't much) along to a satisfying end. Overall, a bit of a disappointment. I think I'll stick to reading Shirley herself!

SURPRISE! A book review!

 Thanks to the global pandemic I'm working from home so I don't have many educational adventures to draw from to revive this blog. Instead, I've got some book reviews to share because let's be real, I've had a lot of reading time on my hands. So what do you say? Ready for an onslaught of my unsolicited opinion?

Let's talk Every Last Fear, an ARC I was excited to request from NetGalley. (If you're a reader/reviewer and don't already have a NetGalley account, be sure to sign up!)

So, the book. 

Matt Pine has been living with his brother's incarceration for years. Older brother Danny was convicted of murdering his girlfriend after an argument at a house party. Matt's family had a hard enough time dealing with his incarceration on their own until the Adlers got involved, a husband and wife director duo who created a documentary for Netflix about Danny's case, a film that proclaimed his innocence and portrayed their hometown as a cesspool of hicks marching around with pitchforks and torches. The Pines-- Liv, Evan, Maggie, Tommy, and Matt- were forced to relocate and their lives were upended by Danny's case.

Now a film student at NYU, Matt learns even more devastating news: the rest of his family, having taken a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Mexico, has been brutally murdered. With the help of FBI Special Agent Keller, Matt tries to unravel his family's last days, figuring out why they went to Mexico in the first place and, more importantly, why they became the target of this heinous crime that was clearly staged to look like an accident.

This book is a nail biter. I stayed up late trying to finish it because I could not put it down and was absolutely not prepared for the twists and turns. I'm generally able to figure out who the real perpetrator is early on in a novel but this book kept me guessing until the very end. The dialogue was realistic, every character drawn out and drawn well, even those who were eliminated in the very first line of the book. No character was expendable; each one played a part and no one was introduced just to have more names on the page. If you like cookie-cutter, cozy mysteries this is not the book for you!

Where's the writer?

My internship with SFWP couldn't have come at a better time as we are about to put out two new releases on May 1. Wendy J. Fox's If the Ice Had Held and Elizabeth Geoghegan's eightball are currently in presale on Amazon and SFWP's website and we have been working hard to push both books.

Given that SFWP is such a small team and there are only two spring releases I've had the opportunity to interact with both authors during the presale marketing process. Both Wendy and Elizabeth are extremely active on social media and both just attended AWP where their books went out into the world for the first time (ARCs don't count!).

The part of the process I did miss out on for their books was the initial editing phase and cover creation though I have to say, in my extremely humble opinion, that both books came out absolutely beautiful. My job has been to work with both authors to find the best outlets for marketing the book, getting shoutouts and early praise. Both books received positive Kirkus reviews and a heap of advanced praise. Wendy's book was included on BuzzFeed's 37 Amazing New Books To Add To Your Spring Reading List. I'll also be helping both authors find contests that they're eligible for.

I'm also helping with the final go-through of the upcoming fall release, Dan Ford's Body Broker. I'll have the opportunity to do marketing for the book when we get closer to its release.

Beyond that, I've had the chance to read a number of contest submissions which has been an interesting experience. I use Submittable for Dark Ink so I'm generally fine with being rather ruthless about turning down a submission because it's for my own magazine and I know exactly what I'm looking for. With the contest, I have to weigh out more factors. Is this something I think has wide appeal, or am I the only one who's ever going to like it? Does this author seem to have a voice of his/her own, or does it sound like something I've read before? It's a different way of approaching the writer in the process since these contest submissions are supposed to be blind. We have to judge the writer simply by what we get off the page in one reading. It's an interesting, and challenging process.

Overall, this entire experience has been very enlightening, especially watching how each individual author has created a platform and markets their work. I also have enjoyed watching how they interact with Andrew. The relationships are very strong and very easy going, but Andrew isn't afraid to tell his authors what he needs from them to make their books a success. I'm looking forward to what's still to come in this internship!

Surprise!

This week's question is what surprised me about my internship.

To be honest, there hasn't been much. I don't know if it's because I was already neck deep in running my own press, or because I had nerded out enough and done enough research that I saw most of the work coming a mile away.

However, I will say that I learned something that has been imperative to my growth as a potential publisher. When I started Dark Ink I was taking over something that was already established. I bought out a press that was failing but had already established its structure and overall business practices. The previous owner relied strictly on Amazon as a "distributor" and that's what we stuck with when we rebranded as Dark Ink. We discovered almost immediately that Amazon is NOT friendly to independent authors or independent presses. In fact, they do their level best to throw up roadblocks that make it very difficult to do high volume business. In order to combat that problem, we started using IngramSpark which was designed specifically for indie publishers. They function as a print on demand warehouse so that indie publishers can make their books available to stores like Barnes and Noble-- essentially expanded distribution that functions better than Amazon's limited distribution options.

One thing that happens to be very important to stores like B&N and even a lot of small indie stores, is the ability to 1) order at wholesale prices and 2) return unsold copies. Neither of those options is available through Amazon because they are too busy trying to scrape the very last penny out of the soul of every indie publisher who uses the service. Once we started using Ingram, we saw an uptick in orders and distribution but we were still moving fewer than 100 units per month of any given book at any one time (except for Dee Michel's Friends of Dorothy which flies out of the warehouse faster than it can be printed).

When I started working with Andrew distribution was the first thing I asked him about. He had mentioned a company called IPG which functions as his "warehouse". However, they do far more than that. They also handle a good deal of the marketing including printing and sending out ARCs, soliciting reviews, and pushing sales. That pushes the selling volume into the 10,000s and puts authors in a much stronger marketing position.

I was surprised to learn that this option existed because I assumed that all marketing in the indie world fell to the publisher and the author. What IPG does bridges the gap between indie and traditional publishing in a creative way. It makes me hopeful that there are options for indies that will actually allow them to gain a greater foothold in the market, allowing them to play on the same field as the traditional houses.

A surprise that makes everyone smile.

A Few of My Favorite Things

But first, a shameless plug for Ed Farrell's debut novel with Dark Ink Press:
White Angel. Clergyman Mickey Powell has been accused of murder...

And that's all I'm going to give you. The book is stunning, set at General Seminary in New York, which coincidentally has appeared in numerous episodes of Law & Order. Mickey Powell is the perfect embodiment of the human side of an Episcopalian minister, desperate to clear his name and solve a murder he most definitely didn't commit.

Ed has also entered his book into the Santa Fe Writer's Project's 2019 Literary Awards! I may be a bit biased since I published this book, but I think it's a winner. Hopefully, guest judge Carmen Machado will think so too.

When I was first assigned to SFWP for my internship I didn't know what to expect. Would I be treated as an equal, or a lowly MFA student who couldn't do much more than proofread emails? I wondered whether I would be happy with my internship and learn anything valuable, or if it would be just one more thing I'd resent having to add to my schedule.

A few weeks before the semester started and our internships officially kicked off, Andrew sent out an email asking if Beth and I would be interested in starting our internships early. Of course, we both said yes because who wouldn't? I jumped in on social media and helped straighten out the Instagram account which, prior to the start of the semester, consisted mostly of photos of Andrew's weekends at the Mussel Bar in Bethesda. Of course the weekend Instagram crowd still loves the cocktail shots but it's been a blast creating and posting a variety of content that helps promote the current catalog, new releases, the literary magazine, and the contest. I've also found that grammar humor goes a long way for the reading crowd! Who knew?

What I love most about this internship is I was allowed to slide right in and start working as if I had been there all along. There was no awkward "getting to know you" phase, no moments of feeling measured up or judged. I was just accepted as part of the team and allowed to operate using my best judgment. I was given access to all of the social media accounts after Andrew joked that it wasn't worth stealing his identity or personal information, and I am constantly being sent items that can be posted. I'm never at a loss for content. If anything, we have far more than we'll ever have an opportunity to use.

The best part of working with Andrew is being able to tell him what I want to accomplish and he provides me with everything I need to do it, including sending me hard copies of books and connecting me directly to the authors he prints. He's even given me the opportunity to do small projects for the authors above and beyond my media work.

I've also gotten to be chief reader on the contest entries that we get in which has actually been a blast. I love reading people's work and seeing what they've decided to send out into the world, knowing that it's one of the scariest things a writer can do. I'm pulling for each and every one of them while occasionally being astonished by the patent lack of preparation some writers put into their submissions. All I can say is, don't submit until your piece has been edited to its best!

Now I'm embarking on a final read of a manuscript that will be coming out in the fall and prepping the media for that novel. I'm also prepping media for the two releases coming out in May which both just earned favorable Kirkus reviews which was really exciting.

All in all, I think it would be really difficult for me to find something I DON'T like about this internship...