“As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives.” -Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

I found that quote—from chapter four of Murray’s book, which is titled “How Thick Is Your Bubble”—via a New York Times blog, and I found that via How to Be Black author Baratunde Thurston’s Twitter feed, so I guess I’m already off to a rather bad start, bubble-wise.

I am one of the people Murray speaks about—born, raised, and lucky to have remained upper-middle-class, with zero lived experience of poverty, rural America, or hand-roughening work. I’ve eaten at an Applebee’s recently only because my sister has kids and lives in the suburbs; I’ve walked a factory floor only because my dad was the boss; I score no points for living in an economically and educationally mixed neighborhood because I am one of the white gentrifiers. I’m friends with a few people who were raised in evangelical Christian families and communities, but they’re all atheists now. (Wait! I was just reminded that one is now a Reform Jew.) I lettered in yearbook, and the only uniform I’ve ever worn was a teal polyester skirt suit required by the bank where I worked for six weeks in 1993, before I quit in tears and admitted to my wealthy, supportive parents that yes, fine, I wanted to go back to college. I have a master’s degree, a professional husband, no kids, and a sense of entitlement a mile wide.

Still, while my Murray-defined bubble is indeed quite thick in some areas (Nascar and military knowledge; “close friendships with people who don’t share my politics,” seeing as how my politics are firmly grounded in how I believe human beings should treat each other), it’s more porous in others (I’ve watched a whole lot of Oprah and Judge Judy, and I walked in my public high school homecoming parade—albeit as a member of Russian Club)—and still more porous in many areas Murray completely ignores in his efforts to paint a picture of “ordinary Americans.”

Murray writes as though being rural, white, Christian, and poor is not its own sort of bubble, as though everyone else in this country is living on the fringes of that center (and voting to spite it). And that’s a load of bullshit even when applied to admittedly privileged and sheltered people like me. Everyday city life, for instance (at least outside the most exclusive enclaves, which tend to be populated by straight-up 1 percenters, not upper-middle-class professionals) comes with a ton of exposure to other people–in good, bad, and chronically irritating ways–and opportunities that simply can’t exist without a certain number of people around to make them worthwhile.

Don’t get me wrong: I am privileged beyond belief, in both the academic and colloquial senses of the word. If I wanted to, I could choose to live in a neighborhood that’s significantly safer, wealthier, and whiter overall than the one I do live in, and I already choose to live in a safer, wealthier, whiter part of this one. My life actually is “highly atypical,” and I am grateful for that.

Nevertheless, here are 25 more questions for Murray and the “ordinary Americans” he speaks for. I can answer “yes” to all of them. If you can’t, how thick is your bubble?

1. Have you ever lived for at least a year in a city with a population greater than 1 million?
2. Have you ever lived without a car for longer than a year?
3. Have you ever lived for at least a year in a municipal area in which more than 10 percent of the population was not white?
4. Have you ever had a close friend of a different race?
5. Have you ever had a close friend who is openly atheist?
6. Have you ever been to a gay wedding?
7. Are any of your close friends gay couples with children?
8. Do you or any of your close friends have more than $50,000 in student loan debt?
9. To your knowledge, have you ever met a transgender person?
10. During the last year, have you attended a free public lecture, reading, performance, or movie screening in your community?
11. Would you and, if applicable, your partner and/or children be able to attend a different free public festival every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day, without traveling more than fifteen miles from home?
12. Have you or, if applicable, your partner and/or children ever been to a Planned Parenthood or similar non-profit clinic for affordable contraception, preventative health care, and/or STI testing?
13. Have there been one or more homicides in your neighborhood in the last month?
14. Have you lived for at least a year in a community with a visible homeless population?
15. Do you have a YMCA or YWCA within five miles of your home?
16. If, as an adult, you wanted to play a sport, take a dance class, or learn or a foreign language, would you be able to in your community? Would you have more than one option?
17. In the past five years, have you seen homeless people fishing in your neighborhood?
18. Have you ever patronized a fast food drive-thru that had a revolving window of bullet-proof glass?
19. Do you live within five miles of a mosque?
20. In the last year, have there been one or more newsworthy acts of violence at your local public high school?
21. Is there a public playground within easy walking distance of your home?
22. Can you travel a mile from your home on foot or by wheelchair or mobility scooter without running out of sidewalk?
23. Can you get from your home to a public library without using a car or spending more than $3? (How about an art museum? A sporting event? A beach? A fireworks display?)
24. Choose one. Who was Jane Addams? Or: Have you ever bought a tamale from a man who came by your local bar at 1 a.m.?
25. Does your state receive fewer tax dollars than it contributes?

In fact, here is what this article tells me:

1) There’s, like, a recession on or something?

2) A lot of books that get published don’t sell. Not exactly breaking news, folks. (And that alarming opening about books languishing on shelves and being returned to publishers unsold? That’s just how it works. Stores take books on consignment, and ship ‘em back to the publishers if they don’t move. There are plenty of reasons to deplore this practice, particularly if you are a publisher or an author [see Awlbiste's comment; it sucks all around], but it is in no way new or unusual. If it’s happening more often these days, well, see point 1. And point 3, actually.)

3) “[M]any publishers have gradually reduced the number of picture books they produce for a market that had seen a glut of them…” That line is pretty well buried in the middle of the article, but I strongly suspect it’s the most accurate summary of the situation. Too many similar products at one time flooded the market, after which the people manufacturing those similar products decided to release fewer of them. “Gradually.” During a recession. WHOA.

4) If at least three upper middle class parents in the New York area have been observed behaving ridiculously, it’s national news. Of course, that in itself is not news: stories about entitled, blinkered parents trying to prime their children for Harvard from the womb forward are just as common as ones about the death of publishing (/reading for pleasure/literacy/coherent English/proper spelling/western civilization).

Look, as a writer, an avid reader and a former editor, I am always bummed to hear about books not selling — whether it’s because of a recession, or a realization that the market is saturated with XYZ type of book, or the fact that most books never sell especially well, relative to the money and labor that go into them (which is why someone writes an article predicting the death of the entire industry about every fifteen minutes). I am also bummed out about the economy, and totally bummed out by the idea of hyper-competitive parents forcing chapter books on their pre-schoolers to better prepare them for the real world where NO ONE’S GONNA DRAW YOU A PICTURE JUST BECAUSE YOUR TINY BRAIN IS STILL DEVELOPING, MAGGOT or something. But I remain utterly unconvinced that that last one is a real trend, much less that it’s eventually going to make picture books go the way of Jarts.

And if you remove that threat from the article, all you’re really left with is, “[M]any publishers have gradually reduced the number of picture books they produce for a market that had seen a glut of them…” During a recession.

I think it’s going to be OK, you guys. I really do.

ETA: You should also check out this perspective from an indie bookseller.

At least I can ramble about writing and reading a bit on the Powell’s bookstore website, where I’m guest-blogging this week. My first post, about the book’s title, went up today. Two more are coming (and Marianne is taking Tuesday and Thursday).

But what I’m thinking about now is inappropriate for Powell’s, for reasons that should be obvious from the post title: It’s about why I love my Kindle so damn much. And that reason is very simple: instant gratification. By which I mean instant gratification. I bought a Sony Reader a couple of years ago and loved the concept — 80 books in my purse at once! — but quit using it as soon as the novelty wore off, which was about 2 weeks later. Why? It was linked to the very limited Sony store, and I needed a PC to download books. Not a computer, a PC — the fucking thing wasn’t even Mac compatible, so I had to use one of Al’s computers. The Sony store has “tens of thousands of books”; the Kindle store has a few hundred thousand and counting. (And when I can’t get a book I want there, I can at least get the satisfaction of clicking the “request a Kindle edition” button.) I can get a book delivered to the Kindle with 1-click ordering from any computer, or wirelessly via the Kindle itself, if I’m sitting at an airport, for instance. (Last time I flew, I went into the airport bookstore as usual, but ended up writing down titles to download instead of buying books to lug with me.)

The truth is, I don’t give a shit about the design of my e-book reader or any bells and whistles. And I certainly don’t give a shit who makes it — if Sony or another competitor linked up with B&N or Borders or Powell’s or any other online bookseller, and offered the same purchasing options, my loyalty to Amazon would dissipate, if not disappear, instantly. But as it is, Amazon’s getting a huge portion of my book-buying dollars these days, because the Kindle is so damned convenient, especially when I’m traveling so much. The device is nice, but they didn’t do anything with the hardware that knocked my socks off. What they did was make it really, really easy to buy books and start reading them immediately, in as few steps as possible.

And given that I spend most of my life online, that’s exactly what I’ve come to expect. If I want information these days, I should be able to find it with a few search words and a couple of clicks. Buying a book for the Kindle is just an extension of that — yeah, I’m paying for it, but it doesn’t involve extra clicking or filling in my credit card info and billing address every time, and the books don’t take any longer to download than a PDF. It’s as seamless as web-surfing. And man, that makes a huge difference in my continued interest in using the product and spending more money on it.

I still love real books, of course. My house is full of them, and when I go to a bookstore, I rarely leave empty-handed. But the Kindle did exactly what technology is supposed to do — it improved upon the original experience, offering desirable extras I couldn’t get from the old version. Sony just didn’t go far enough with that — if I had to go wire up the Reader to Al’s computer, only to find they didn’t have the book I wanted anyway, what was the point? (If I’m going to be disappointed that they don’t have what I want, I might as well get out of the house and go to a bookstore.) Amazon gave me a reason to want and use an e-book reader, despite my abiding love for real books and real bookstores. Whatever issues I may have with them, they did what it took to change the way I read and make me a loyal customer. I’m happy to reward that kind of innovation and market savvy, even if I also wish they had some real competition for me to check out.

10 Basic Steps to Finding a Literary Agent

Miss Snark’s Archives

Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents, which provides loads of 101 stuff.

Reading all that will probably take you at least a couple weeks. It’s okay, I’ll wait for you to come back. Because that advice leads us to my number one tip for writers looking to get published: Take the time to learn about the fucking industry. And that leads us to the story of how I got an agent.

After I graduated from university in 1997, I got an internship at Random House of Canada. It was only three months long, and I spent most of my time there rejecting unsolicited manuscripts and drinking coffee in the Shopsy’s downstairs with a fellow intern I had a crush on — but even that gave me way more insight into the publishing industry than I’d ever gotten from reading books about it. (And I’d read every book I could find, ’cause that’s the kind of nerd I am.) Seriously, if you’re a writer and you’re ever in a position to do an internship at a publishing house, I highly recommend it. Ditto publishing classes — during that time, I took some at Ryerson University and got a whole whack of other insights, as well as the habit of using “a whack” to mean “a lot.” As all that was wrapping up, I met the publisher of Insomniac Press in a bar and ended up working there for the next two years. (And dating that guy for years, after I broke up with the intern, but that’s another story.)

What does this have to do with how I got an agent in 2008? Everything.

First, I’m not kidding when I say I took the time to learn the industry. At a small press, regardless of your job title, you learn something about editing, design, printing, publicity, marketing, sales, and — perhaps most importantly — authors. Specifically, the gulf between most authors’ expectations (the world) and what a publisher is actually equipped to do for them (very close to squat). You learn that people really want to work with authors who understand the following things:

• Publishing is a business.
• Businesses need to make money.
• Books don’t sell, as a general rule.
• People in publishing work their asses off for no money anyway because they really, really love books.

And you learn that people don’t want to work with authors who believe the following things:

• They are artistes who need not pollute their special artiste brains with businessy shit.
• Their experimental novel/poetry collection/biography of a 13th-century monk would totally sell a gazillion copies if you’d just spend the money to promote it right.
• They don’t need much editing.
• An editor’s job consists solely of marking up manuscripts, thus editors have loads of free time to chat.
• If a representative of the publishing company does not seem to be spending enough time/money/effort on their books, it is because that person is a twit who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about quality literature.

In short, you learn what makes an author an asshole. And you learn that people in publishing try their very best to avoid working with assholes. (Exception: Assholes who write books that make gobs of money.) This means that one of the most crucial skills you can develop if you aspire to be published — possibly the single most crucial skill — is not being an asshole. Seriously, I can’t emphasize that one enough. Don’t be an asshole. You’ll thank me, I promise.

Second, as the aside about dating suggests, I learned that publishing is a ridiculously social industry. I only worked full-time in the industry for about three years, but I met loads of people, who kept me abreast of all the gossip and new developments long after I left. If I’d decided to stick around and try to sell a manuscript in Canada, I would have been able to call up a few different agents and editors who already liked me and knew I could write, which is hands-down the fastest way to get in the door. Know someone. If you can’t quit your job and go work in publishing, go to writers’ conferences with authors, editors, and agents. And even if you can’t go to conferences, it is still not that hard to meet someone who knows someone in the industry. Readings, classes at the Y, corner bars, the blogosphere — published authors and publishing professionals can be found in all these places. Meet one, don’t be an asshole, and you’re on your way.

Fact is, meeting all those people in Canadian publishing turned out to be a waste for me, career-wise (friendship-wise, it was terrific) because I moved back to the States, where it’s a whole different industry with all different people. Friends in Toronto probably could have helped me out with some contacts in New York if I’d asked, but I didn’t end up needing them, because like I said, it’s not actually that hard to find someone who knows someone. Which brings me to how I found my agent.

But first, I’ve got to tell you about the New York Times.

In the fall of 2007, I got an e-mail from a reporter for the Times who was interested in doing an article on the Fatosphere in general and Shapely Prose in particular. Let me tell you, this was the single moment when my publishing experience — however out-of-date and geographically irrelevant — made the most difference to my writing career. Because my first thought after, “Holy shit, a reporter from the NYT wants to talk to me!” was, “Holy shit, I’ve got to get a book proposal done NOW!” If I’d learned anything from working in publishing, it was this: There will never, ever come a better time in your life to query literary agents than the day an article about you comes out in The New York Times.

So I immediately IM’ed Marianne, with whom I’d been half-assedly kicking around the idea of doing a book, and said, It’s go time. Then I called the reporter and said things like, “Hey, have you talked to Marianne Kirby, The Rotund, yet? Because you should really talk to Marianne Kirby, The Rotund. Her blog, The Rotund, is VERY important in the Fatosphere, and oh, by the way, we’re writing a book together. Marianne Kirby. The Rotund.”

She called Marianne. We were both mentioned in the article (though the book wasn’t). And before we could even get the book proposal formatted properly, I had e-mails from an agent and two editors in my inbox.

“Have you ever thought of writing a book?” they said.

“Why, yes — in fact, Marianne Kirby and I have been working on a practical guide to loving your body, and we can have a proposal to you by Friday,” I said.

“Capital!” they said. (Okay, not really, but it would be so cool if they had.)

Two weeks later, Marianne and I had an agent, and two months later, we had a book contract.

BUT. That’s still not the story of how I found an agent. The agent who signed us isn’t the one who contacted me. As I said in a previous post, the unsolicited attention just made me think, “Hmm, it’s an even better time to query agents than I expected. I should see who else might be interested.” So I e-mailed the following 3 friends:

• One of my besties from high school
• A friend of hers whom I’d met once in person and become friendly with online
• Another blogger and published author whom I’d also gotten to know online

All of these people knew agents. (See? Not that hard.) All of them said, “Of course!” when asked if I could drop their names. So I queried two out of three of those agents (never even got around to the other) with the delicious one-two punch: “We have a mutual friend, and my co-author and I were just featured in a New York Times article.”

I happened to be going to New York the following week for a conference anyway, and I ended up going there with appointments to meet three agents. Marianne and I got to choose which one we wanted to go with. It was ridiculous.

So.

Learn about the business of publishing. Make friends in the industry, or friends who have friends in the industry. Don’t be an asshole. And if a New York Times reporter calls, get your freakin’ book proposal finished.

That’s how I found an agent.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Galleycat points to the recent success of Suze Orman’s book Women & Money, even after a million e-copies were given away: it just kept selling anyway, which came as a shock to many. Of course, Suze Orman has Oprah behind her. There’s that.

Here’s what I think: there is a time for free, and a time for charging out the wazoo. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

I wouldn’t be sitting here right now waiting for my agent to call and tell me when the auction date for my book will be if I hadn’t been giving my writing away for almost a year now; I only have an agent, let alone the interest of multiple publishers, because I developed a substantial readership by blogging (as did Marianne). I am a tested quantity, if not yet a proven one (we’ll still have to see if the blog readership translates to book sales, after all).

Now, I could have gone about becoming a tested quantity by freelancing — i.e., querying my ass off, absorbing rejection after rejection, and occasionally getting paid to write something for an outlet with specific guidelines that may or may not have accommodated my natural voice (you don’t see “fuck” in print quite enough for my tastes). And since we’re speaking hypothetically here, let’s say I was even successful at it: lots of high quality publications, enough money to live on, a good reputation in the industry.

The whole “enough money to live on” thing sounds awfully appealing, but there are still a few noteworthy disadvantages to doing it that way:

1) Getting to a point where I’d published enough to become a desirable commodity to agents and book publishers would have taken a lot longer than 10 months.

2) My clips wouldn’t necessarily represent my voice accurately, because I would have been writing for specific markets, as opposed to writing for anyone who drops by and likes my work enough to stick around. The blog is me in a way magazine articles never could be. (Having said that, one assumes the book will be much better than the blog, seeing as how it’ll be revised and edited, which my blog posts are not. )

3) Even with a substantial clip file, all I’d be able to show potential agents and editors would be that some other editors thought I was worth publishing, and my work had been available to however many thousands or millions of readers. None of us would know how many of those people actually read my articles, though, or how many of those had actually liked them. With the blog, I can tell you exactly how many thousands of page views and unique hits I get every single day, which represent people seeking out my writing specifically. (Well, and my co-bloggers’ now, but at first it was just me.) I can point you to tens of thousands of comments to give you a sense of how people respond to my writing. I can say, “Hey, readers, would you buy a book by Marianne Kirby and me?” and get 100 responses in a day. That comes in handy.

4) I would have spent however many years it took to build that clip file dealing with frequent rejection, loads of uncertainty, and virtually no feedback from readers on the work I was doing. That shit can be seriously demoralizing, and like many writers, I’m a bit of a delicate flower. But with the blog, I get to publish anything I feel like publishing, and I start getting reader feedback within five minutes of posting. I can determine what works and what doesn’t by whether I get 10 comments or 400 or somewhere in between — and then try to do more of what works. I get loads of lavish praise from readers, which is a hell of a lot nicer for my psyche than the loads of rejection that even the best freelancers are subject to. And that means my confidence has grown steadily along with the blog. I know, in a way I never could have otherwise, that real people enjoy reading my work, and they will tell their friends. Which means A) I’m constantly motivated to keep writing — I never have those, “God, is this even worth it?” days anymore — and B) I’m in a much better frame of mind to advocate for myself as a businessperson.

When one agent and a couple of editors contacted me to discuss the possibility of a book, I didn’t leap to sign with that agent or, worse yet, to go agentless and sign a boilerplate contract with a publisher. I mean, don’t get me wrong — I was shitting myself over the fact that people were coming to me, instead of the other way around. But stunned gratitude is not the same as desperation. Instead of assuming that those few expressions of interest were the only shots I’d ever get at being deemed worthy by the book publishing industry, I thought, “Hmm, here’s more than one expression of interest. I’ve got something marketable here.” Which meant I queried other agents and ended up in a position to choose among them. And the agent we did choose is confident that within the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be able to choose which publishing house we’d like to go with.

I am, of course, no Suze Orman — I’m no Susie Orbach, for that matter — but I’m in a position of power over my own writing career that few first-time authors are lucky enough to be in. Furthermore, it’s all happened in a matter of weeks, instead of months or years of doing pretty much what I’d have to do as a freelance writer: querying widely, waiting, waiting, waiting, hoping, attempting to take each rejection in stride, waiting some more, and maybe, if the planets aligned just right, getting an agent interested in the proposal. Because I had both the readership and the confidence to present myself as a (potentially) valuable commodity, it was a whole different ballgame.

And that was all a direct result of giving my writing away for free. Being in a position to get paid for writing – which has been my goal since I was about 6 — is the direct result of giving it away. So, you know, I’m pretty okay with that decision.