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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
A related, though less taxing question: What's it like being your own publisher, in the sense that you have information, like how any copies you've sold, that many writers make a point of pretending doesn't exist?
I'm going to call it a strange Victorian idea, that the authors are away somewhere in a château and all of the people are somewhere else down in the engine room, shoveling coal into the furnace. A lot of authors are like this, where they really want to be completely divorced from all of the mechanics and the making of the books and all that. And then there are those who are always at war with it and always feel like their publisher isn't doing enough for them and they got screwed or whatever.
The problem is, some publishers won't even tell you the truth. They want to keep it all mysterious. But I do adult seminars in San Francisco every month, where we have panels of published writers talking to aspiring writers, and I always make the point that the publishing business, at any level, is still a very gentlemanly business. It's eccentric and still peopled by book-loving people, and the profit margins are narrow, and everyone's overworked and doing the best they can.
In terms of the numbers, I think if the truth is out there for everybody, then everybody is a lot better off. It quells some of the misunderstanding that goes on. I've had so many friends that were published -- and I think published well -- and then they get really angry because they don't even understand how it works and they think, "Well, my book about South American dog trainers in the 16th century only sold 4,000 copies, and it's my publisher's fault!"
That's the thing with writing -- the numbers are most often so dismal. It can be frightening, always worrying you're not selling enough, that no publisher will give you a second or third shot. You don't think that always staring the numbers in the face can have an adverse effect?
It's true, we know all the numbers. There are only four people at McSweeney's, so we all know how much money a book makes, how much it costs to print a book in Wisconsin, how much it costs to print a book in China, how much it costs to print a book in Iceland. We know how much of the cover price the bookstore takes, how much the distributor takes, how much it costs to ship a box of books to Canada overnight.
But it's empowering, incredibly empowering, to know how it all works. If we didn't know how it works, we wouldn't be able to put out Stephen Dixon's book ["I"] that no one else would publish, and William Vollmann's book ["Rising Up And Rising Down," which is seven volumes and thousands of pages] that no one else would publish, because we know the numbers and we know how to figure them out to work for these authors and these strange projects.
OK, last question: So I understand you're working on a film adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are"?
Yeah, I've been working with Spike Jonze for about a year on the script. The movie's in production, I guess you'd say. Maurice Sendak has signed off on the basic storyline we did. So that's been really fun. I never thought I would write screenplays, in any form. I just sort of consciously avoided it with "A Heartbreaking Work." Nick Hornby and D.V. DeVincentis wrote a screenplay for that. I really didn't want to be involved at the time. But Spike is one of my favorite directors and "Malkovich" in particular is one of my very favorite movies. I don't know how much detail I can or should go into about "Wild Things," but it's very -- as you would expect from Spike -- it's not really what you would expect. It's what Maurice wants for the book, but it's very odd, too. I think I better go now. I'm in the parking lot.
What does that mean?
I'm standing in the parking lot of a mall. I called you on the way to the mall, then I got to the mall, and we were still talking. I didn't want to go into the mall talking to you, because it'd be too loud. So I've been standing in the parking lot for the last half an hour. It's kind of cold and...
Yeah, you should go inside.
And I look kind of suspicious out here, I think. People thinking I'm casing their cars.
