Helpful Definitions for Modern Authors

Draft

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

You, Author: Act as Book’s Publicist, responsible for promotion.

Your Publicist: Acts as your Mom. Tells you that you’re special and talented but makes you do everything for yourself. Brags to friends whenever you’re in the newspaper. Tacitly takes credit.

Your Mom: Acts as Book’s Audience, buying most of the copies.

Your Audience: With social media, book blogs and online reading communities, acts as Book’s Reviewer.

Your Book’s (Ideal) Reviewer: Loves Book. Shows this by doling out once-a-year allotted comparison to James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the highest honor a reviewer can bestow upon a civilian author. Like a buzzed friend, Reviewer occasionally gets creepy loyal out of nowhere. Advocates for Book out of the noble sense that it’s a work that should be read, and out of a fear that it won’t be. Invests in Book and asks others to do the same. In other words, acts as your Agent.

Your Agent: Acts as Book’s Editor.

Your Editor: Acts as Book’s Publisher, handling how it will be packaged and marketed.

Your Publisher: Creates Book’s mold ahead of time, insofar as it curates the existing market into which book must fit. (Additional duty: being dumbfounded by that market.) Has an influence present at Book’s inception and steers project with implicit requirements, meticulously directing without directly touching, like the people with the brooms in curling. And, by working backward from the numbers and trends and making Book a function of the bottom line, ultimately has final word on content — in other words, acts as Book’s Author.


Some Additional Useful Vocabulary

Local Independent Bookstore: Acts as a place where Potential Purchasers of your Book warm their souls with coffee smells, where they scan the marvelous waiting pulpy rectangles, a kind of moderated overwhelming. And where, after years of this type of browsing, they process through subconscious ritual: the eyes catching on some piece of smooth cardboard, a mystical traction building. All goes quiet for your Potential Purchasers as they lift Book, bounce its heft, convert its weight to hours and permit themselves to be courted by the coy, stationary arguments of the stationery: for even the layout and paper type are a series of winked promises. Like love, or at least lust: they didn’t know Book was what they’d been missing until they saw it. Offering to fill in their shortcomings, Book promises a kind of completion. To purchase a book, they know, is both a continuation of something and a new beginning, part of their plan and a pleasant detour. And right there your Potential Purchasers commit to it and lose to it, yield an afternoon and claim a lifestyle. Approaching the register, the Potential Purchasers of Book see the store’s employee and can’t help but smile a hearty, thankful grin, a bodily smile usually reserved for chefs or nurses holding pain medication. Then the Potential Purchasers leave to buy Book for $2 less on Amazon.

Amazon.com: A website where people can order everything, including bricks and mortar. Site acts as your Friend by recommending things you might want to read and by always being there for you at 3 a.m. to make decisions you’ll half regret.

Friends: Act like Amazon, not ranking your book as high as you’d like or recommending it to enough people, but still sending you lots of emails you never read.


Self-Published Authors: Treated as Crazy Ranting People: either ignored or pitied by the general public until they do something that is brilliant or threatening.

Crazy Ranting People: Still pretty good at selling traditionally published books.


Platform: A long piece of wood Authors use to prod people they sort of know into attending Readings.

Internet: The much-feared best advertisement for Books, and their perfect complement: one being a high-tech place where you can go to be connected and somehow feel alone, the other a low-tech thing where you can go to be alone and somehow feel connected.

Readings: Acts as opportunity for audiences to spend time reading author’s behavior, making a series of observations —“She likes water, saw her drink a whole bottle. Oh yeah, big time water drinker”— that often culminate in the conclusion that Author is human.

Blurb: The sound made by an author paying back a favor.


Bags for Buying Book: For a long time were made of paper or plastic, and more recently a canvaslike material.

Books: For a long time were made of a canvaslike material, now paper or, more recently, plastic.


Steve Macone is a writer living in Somerville, Mass.