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Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009
A writer journeys into the strange, savage land of his readers and finds himself performing unspeakable acts.
Mar 2, 1999 | When my first novel, "Warp," was published in late 1997, I was hungry for feedback: reviews, e-mail, sales figures, whatever objective confirmation I could get that I was in fact finally a published author. Like a fetishist in a shoe store, I fondled copies of my own book in Barnes & Noble. Following the example of Michael Chabon's "Wonder Boys," I even listed my e-mail address on the cover. And I fell into the habit of obsessively checking and rechecking the page on which my book is listed on Amazon.com.
Why? Because although to the average surfer the pages of Amazon.com are just so much browser-window dressing, for an attention-starved author they are tiny peepholes through which a writer can eavesdrop, voyeuristically, on his or her book as it interacts with the real world. And that has some serious consequences. It's turning Amazon into a powerful force, a force that's changing the very structure of literary culture as we know it -- a force, dear reader, that made me do terrible, terrible things.
Right off the bat I clicked on "I am the author, and I want to comment on my book," and I even spent some time leafing through Amazon's pages to see which of my fellow authors were experimenting with this brand-new literary form. My brief survey turned up the work of Rebecca Wells (of "Ya-Ya Sisterhood" fame), Christopher Morse (on his "Island of the Sequined Love Nun": "It's one thing to watch some guy on National Geographic living with the natives, it's quite another to do it yourself") and the innovative English novelist and essayist Alain de Botton, author of "On Love" and "How Proust Can Change Your Life."
De Botton says he came across Amazon when he was just starting out online, and it had the same effect on him that it had on me. "I was so amazed by the site technologically that I lost my normal reserve and revealed all. Since then, I've lived to regret it a number of times, though there have been some nice surprises, too." Nice indeed. De Botton posted his e-mail address, one thing led to another and, as luck would have it, one of his online correspondences eventually blossomed into a real-life, nonvirtual love affair. "It was a wonderful, unexpected event," de Botton muses, "and far from what I had bargained for when I put my details on Amazon."
I too would get more than I bargained for from the reading public. But my surprise wasn't quite that nice.
It's worth noting that nobody on the Amazon side of things monitors author postings very closely -- witness the occasional amusing error. It occurred to me to wonder how Amazon even knows it's the author who's writing in, but on that score Bill Curry, Amazon's director of public relations, is determined to stay mum: "That's just something we prefer not to address." Somebody's paying attention, though, because my attempt to pass myself off as John Updike commenting on "In the Beauty of the Lilies" ("I'm a talented but ultimately overhyped middlebrow writer ...") failed completely.
Meanwhile, I was paying close attention to the datapoints that Amazon.com kept flowing past me in a steady stream. The site kept track of what other books the people who bought my book bought, supplying me with an ever changing cast of literary bedfellows. Me and David Remnick? Golly! (Note that the correlation doesn't necessarily go both ways -- "Warp" doesn't show up on the page for Remnick's "King of the World.") I also monitored my Amazon.com sales rank, which according to Curry is computed daily -- hourly for books in the top 10,000. After a hot debut in the low four figures, "Warp" descended, gracefully, to its current position of 136,495th, just behind an out-of-print edition of Samuel Richardson's "Charles Grandison." Whoops -- make that 147,649th.
But most of all I waited -- God, how hungrily I waited -- for the customer reviews to start arriving. And then they did. And that's when the ugliness began. And the lies, and the fear, and the deception.
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