Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar.

In this segment, we cover Stackpole’s “house slaves” comparison, whether traditional publishing is in trouble, and the importance of quality and self-promotion in self-publishing.

Me: In your recent blog posts, you draw a comparison between the world of publishing and–I believe you used the term "house slaves"?

Michael: Well, with house slaves I’m referring very specifically to those authors who have done well traditional publishing and basically are denigrating all self-publishers and taking the traditional publishers’ word for it that they don’t need to worry about digital publishing, they don’t need to worry about any of those things because the traditional publisher will take care of them.

And I find it very funny because these are the same guys who very quickly will end up telling you that, "Hey, you know, my publisher screws me over all the time, they’re always late with payments, they never listen this, working with my editor is really really tough," but when it comes to, "Hey, dude, stop bitching, do it yourself," "Oh, no no, I don’t need to, because sales are up enough, and I can’t do this, and I can’t do that," And it’s like, you know, fish or cut bait.

Unfortunately for those individuals, for the house slaves who are invested in traditional publishing, the publishing business is changing so fast, just unbelievably fast, that they’re going to be screwed. The last blog post that I did talking about the fact that publishers are shortening the window between hardback and paperback publication. That means that if you cannot deliver faster–the days of taking a year to do a novel, or five or six years to do a novel, are gone. If you can’t deliver on a steady basis, you’re toast.

Me: You know, Maxwell Grant, the author of the Shadow novels, he did two novels a month for like twenty, forty years–

Michael: Yeah, Walter Gibson, and Lester Dent who wrote most of the Doc Savage novels as Kenneth Robeson, he also did one or more novels a month, about 60,000 words. Which actually is not that hard to do.

And I really think, looking back at the pulps, I always used to think when I was growing up as a writer, I would love to have lived back in the days of the pulps because you could do tons of stuff then, there were that many markets. Now I am of the firm conviction that I think the authors who were writing in the days of the pulps would wish that they were writing now in the days of digital, because they would be so much better off.

Me: Do you think traditional publishing is in trouble now?

Michael: There’s no question about it. No question about it that it’s in trouble. It has lost the majority of its shelf space. I mean, that’s just gone. Barnes & Noble is beginning to market books more like magazines than they are like books. It’s forcing traditional publishers to change their model. They’re pricing their digital product too high because their overhead is too high. And they’re not making changes in that regard quickly enough.

Me: Borders basically just vanished.

Michael: Borders vanished, so there goes 10% of their market, probably 20% of their shelf space, but you look at Barnes & Noble, Barnes & Noble now they’ve got cafes, they’ve got their Nook boutique that’s eating up shelf space. They’ve got their flavor of the month, whatever their hit of the month is, shelf space. I had a novel come out last November, and it was out there for two, maybe three months, and then vanished. A year ago, two years ago, that never would have happened.

Me: And publishing is still stuck on that model where they take back and destroy a significant fraction of the books that they print.

Michael: Absolutely.

Me: And it’s amazing that nobody’s tried to do anything about that yet in this economy.

Michael: It’s because that’s just been the way it’s been done for so long, and because in some ways it’s being a slave to your drug dealer, you know, or to your customer. Bookstores won’t let them change and bookstores are their primary market.

Me: You know, the agency pricing thing that they implemented that basically Apple forced them to implement…

Michael: Right

Me: It’s kind of funny really because they were so afraid that Amazon might cut their revenues by insisting that they sell for cheaper that they went ahead and cut their own revenues from half of hardcover price to, what is it, 70% of e-book price.

Michael: But they wanted the ability to–their fear was that digital sales would cannibalize paper sales before they had a chance to shift their economy over.

Me: And that consumers would get used to thinking e-books were "supposed to be" cheap.

Michael: Right.

Me: Little too late for that.

Michael: They wanted the ability to control the price so that people would not be buying the cheaper e-books preferentially. They try all sorts of things. They’ve tried windowing, delaying the release of digital books.

It’s funny that we’re here at GenCon because the gaming industry for years and years had PDFs available. They don’t do any windowing. Or they release the electronic versions earlier and you can go down and talk to anybody, they’ll tell you that e-book sales do not cannibalize print sales. And people do buy souvenir copies of things.

Publishing, modern publishing, traditional publishing has never done a good job of market research. They don’t understand their market, they don’t understand what their readers want, what their demographic is, how their readers buy, and this has been a big problem for them. So they’re now reaping the fact that they haven’t paid attention to what’s going on.

Me: Is there anything that I haven’t covered that you think is important to mention about self-publishing these days?

Michael: I think the real trick is going to be this: that if you’re an author and you’re going to self-publish, make sure that that book is as good as possible. Get editors, get other people to look it over. Form writer co-ops to help each other get books up to publishable quality, because the worst thing you can do is put a product out there that is sub-standard, that isn’t good enough.

Even if you’re self-publishing digitally, it is always true: our books have to be better than the last guy’s book. And this cuts in two ways: One, the writing has got to be there, and two, you’ve got to make sure that your book design, the way the book goes together, looks really good, looks better than what traditional publishers are doing.

Me: Is there an answer to the "self-publishing slushpile" problem, wherein now that everybody’s self-publishing, any decent works will get buried under Sturgeon’s share?

Michael: That’s totally fallacious. There’s no sense to that. If you promote your work, if you make sure that one you have a website, two you give away samples, three you have contests, four you go out and you meet people, you build community, you do all the little things that you have to do to promote your work, you’ll draw attention to it and if it is of quality other people will go ahead and let you know and let their friends know.

When I brought out In Hero Years I’m Dead, I turned around and shot copies out to lots of writers I know, I shot copies out to blog writers I know, I shot copies out to podcasters I know, and I talked about doing interviews and what can we do to publicize this. I had to sit down and promote promote promote.

So now you’ve got to wear two hats. You have to be writing the material and that is job one, always be writing the material. But you also have to promote, and if you promote, that’s how you rise out of that sea. There are going to be tons of people that put books out there for 99 cents or three dollars or five dollars or ten dollars expecting the money just to roll in. They’re not going to roll up their sleeves, they’re not going to do any work.

When you look at Joe Konrath or you look at Amanda Hocking or you look at other people who are doing this successfully, they sit down and do the full job. They make it the best package and the best quality item to sell possible, then they let people know that it’s out there. And that’s the only thing that you can do.

That promotion side will make sure that it rises above that great morass, and as long as your book is good, you will find an audience. Science fiction and fantasy is one of the most forgivable genres ever. Because even if the book is horrible, if we like a character’s name or we like one line out of the thing, we’ll recommend it to other people. We are such soft touches! Well, once we do that, then that’s the word of mouth that will sell more stories. So make it really good and then let people know it’s out there. And that’s how you win at this game.

Me: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time.

Michael: You are more than welcome.

Me: I really appreciate the chance to talk with you.

Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conanmovie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar.

In this segment, we discuss piracy, e-book pricing, editing, and the “Storyteller’s Bowl” publishing model.

Me: Getting back to the thing you wrote about piracy, do you think anything major has changed since then?

Michael: I think that, looking more at piracy, that there are really two types of pirates. There is the pirate who’s out to make money. The pirate who grabs my stuff and puts it up on a for-pay site and is taking money and not paying me. And those guys, I will do anything I can to hunt them down and take their stuff. Because that’s basically what they’re doing to me. So that’s one set of pirates. There are mechanisms in place to go after them.

The other sort of pirates, recreational pirates if you will, are…the guys who go to a science fiction convention, they come to GenCon, and they hold up a thumb drive and say, "I’ve got 55,000 science fiction novels on this thumb drive! I’m king of the thumb drives!" And some other guy says, "Yeah? I got sixty on this one." And so the first guy now has got to go and find those other five thousand.

Me: And how many of them is he actually going to read?

Michael: He’s never going to read them, and he was never part of my target audience anyway. So his piracy, to collect in that sense, is like someone that collects marbles and diamonds because they’re all sparkly. They’re not collecting the diamonds for the value of the diamonds; they’re collecting them for something that we don’t value, for another part of its nature. So they’re not part of my economy.

Me: And there are also those who download works because they consider the prices being charged by publishers to be too high.

Michael: I think that piracy occurs when the asked-for value of something grossly exceeds the perceived value of something. Well, if what we’re asking for something is not grossly above its perceived value, if we’re giving bargain, dollar-for-dollar bargains, then pirates don’t have that justification that they think they’ve been ripped off in the past and now they’re going to get even.

I think the other thing that authors have to do and readers have to understand is that this really is a quid pro quo situation here. If you want to see more work by me, you have to pay me. If you like ice cream and you walk into Baskin Robbins, you don’t serve yourself, because that Baskin Robbins isn’t going to be there anymore. It can be the same way with me, that if I turn out a story you like and you want to see more of those stories, I do have to be paid.

Me: And moving from piracy to self-publishing, when you self-publish do you have your manuscripts edited by anybody?

Michael: It depends on the manuscript. For short stories, no, I’ll just do it myself. Part of the aspect of editing, at least for me, is longer work is harder to keep all in your mind all at the same time. So for me, a book of about 50, 60,000 words I can pretty much handle the editing job and I don’t need to go outside. That doesn’t mean I won’t have other people look it over, but I don’t feel constrained to hire and editor or ask friends of mine who are editors to do an edit job. For longer books, yeah, I do have editors go over the stuff. Absolutely.

Me: You have said that for pricing, you consider $6 or so to be the most reasonable price point?

Michael: I’m sort of feeling right now that six dollars is pretty much where I want to cap stuff for a single book. The only time that I would go higher is if I do an omnibus edition of something. Obviously, then you’re getting multiple books in one package. But I’m thinking, yeah, five or six bucks is pretty much the price range where I think it’s a fair exchange of value.

Me: It’s funny, you know, some people have done studies that suggest in some cases people are more likely to buy a book that’s $5 or $6 than they are to buy one that’s 99 cents, because of the feeling that you get what you pay for.

Michael: Absolutely. I just did a blog post on this. On pricing, the market is so new and there are so many variables that we have a hard time accounting for that any definitive word of what the best price is for anything is absurd. What I do know is there are some guys who are very comfortable putting stuff out at 99 cents. Other people think that $2.99 is the sweet spot. Other authors, myself included, I’ve not had any complaints at the $5 to $6 range. I think a smart author is going to have digital products whether it’s single stories, collections of short stories, novels, and omnibus versions that are ranging in price from 99 cents all the way to $10. That way, people can come, they can decide what they’re going to take as samples, you appeal to every budget.

Me: Have you been following any of the stuff that Joe Konrath is doing?

Michael: I’ve seen a lot of what he’s been doing, yes. Joe swears that $2.99 is the sweet spot. And I was not impressed with the methodology of the experiment that he ran to discover that that was the sweet spot. He’s certainly selling a lot of stuff, but I think that for me as a science fiction/fantasy author to compare my numbers to his numbers doesn’t make any sense. He’s writing in the mystery-thriller area which historically has always sold more and is more accessible. So I don’t think…until we’re able to nail down more of those variables, like where do we expect the sales from your genre, I think trying to get a holistic market view and trying to figure out where the equivalencies are is ridiculous.

Me: So, earlier this year, you reduced your target numbers for that book you were planning to write if enough people bought the first book. How is that project looking now?

Michael: I dropped the number in half. We’re at about the 40% mark. So probably we’re a year and a half out would be my guess in terms of getting people to sign on, but then again because the market is up, because the market is growing, it could be by Christmas that that stuff will all be eaten up.

Me: Have you seen the alternate price model that came to be called the "Storyteller’s Bowl" model that’s been used by a few authors where basically you write the work, post the first chapter, and then ask for donations. When the donations reach a certain amount you post the next one, and so forth.

Michael: That’s the busking for bucks model as Stephen King did with The Plant.

Me: The "pure" version of the model requires that the author actually have the work completed before he does this and held in escrow so people know they’ll get what they pay for.

Michael: Yeah, and here’s the thing that I don’t like about that particular model is that I personally don’t like buying a piece of something. I want the whole thing. Now that doesn’t mean that I’m averse to telling a story in serial format, like Cryptomancy which is the first collection of Trick Molloy stories that I did. Each story is a complete story in and of itself. They come together when I put them together as an episodic novel so if you get that collection of stories and start at the beginning and run to the end you’ve got a complete novel. You’ve got a growth arc for a character and all those sorts of things. So I’m certainly not averse to breaking that larger arc into smaller pieces, but I don’t want to sell somebody something that ends on a cliffhanger that they’re not going to know how it comes out, just because I would hate to buy that. And I don’t want my ability to get the rest of the story dependant upon what other people are going to do.

Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar.

In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how to restock the public domain. We get more into direct self- and e-publishing matters in the further segments.

Me: I’d like to start by asking: how did you get into self-publishing?

Michael: Well, probably the very first stuff I was self-publishing was my how-to-write newsletter, The Secrets, which I taught classes at GenCon and other conventions for many years and decided to do a newsletter. Decided to make it Internet subscription only, so starting about 7, 8 years ago I was doing this bi-weekly newsletter as PDFs. So that was the very first thing that I did. Right there I realized the possibilities for doing this.

Many years ago I had gotten Apple Newtons and gone through a series of Palm Pilots and every time with the Apple Newtons, with the Palm Pilots, always get the software that would allow me to make electronic books that would work on those devices. Because again I just found it fascinating, and found that huge potential there.

You fast-forward to the Kindle coming out and now all the tablets and all the dedicated readers and suddenly all that potential that I was seeing those many years ago both had devices that made it easier for other people to use and also put in place marketplaces that suddenly made it possible to have an economy based on selling your own work.

Me: It’s funny, you know, those of us who’ve been reading e-books ever since the nineties had gotten to the point of despairing that anybody would ever be interested, and finally Jeff Bezos came along and basically single-handedly created the e-book market.

Michael: Right. You know, I really thought when the Newton came out, because it had on more reader software—I really had high hopes for that. And then when Apple abandoned the Newton and didn’t do anything else to follow that up and didn’t keep that software alive, I felt that that was unfortunate.

And then the software that was being used to make books for the Palm Pilot—unfortunately the company that put it out hit on the plan of charging a royalty for the authors who used their software. [eReader, nee Peanut Press. When Fictionwise bought the company, it discontinued this practice. —CM] And I absolutely balk at that. I mean, this is like the guy who built your house having a percentage every time you sell it. No, no, this job was done along time ago! So I didn’t like that.

So again, now we finally do have both a means to make it convenient for people and an economic structure that makes it very viable for authors to be able to do things, even original things, which is kind of cool.

Me: Yeah, it’s funny that eventually one of the companies that was using eReader’s, or rather Peanut Press’s software back then eventually bought it.

Michael: Right.

Me: And that was Fictionwise, and they completely opened it up, but by then it was kind of too late.

Michael: It was, and down through the years I’ve gotten in touch with Fictionwise and what they wanted for an author to self-publish was they wanted you to have at least ten things—ten novels or whatever—that you were going to be able to bring to that. And even as a published novelist who owns the rights to certain things, I didn’t have and I really didn’t think anybody else was going to have a catalog of books that we’d be able to toss out there just ready to go.

I also think I didn’t like the terms of their contracts—and fortunately we’ve seen the exclusives aspects of contracts going away now, which is good. That’ s always just been stupid. Especially when you’re watching new formats and new platforms come out, why would you sign something away forever when you know in the next week somebody may come up with a brand new thing that will be the new hot thing, and suddenly you’ve signed those rights away. That doesn’t make any sense.

Me: Uh-huh. And certainly one of the big issues in publishing right now is the percentage of royalties.

Michael: Right.

Me: With a lot of publishers balking at giving any kind of high percentage royalties on backlist e-books, and then there’s Amazon and to a lesser extent Barnes & Noble offering 65 to 70% royalties.

Michael: Right.

Me: And so we’ve actually seen estates of major authors like Ian Fleming and Catherine Cookson and so forth taking their backlists directly to Amazon.

Michael: More important than that is you’ve got J.K. Rowling doing electronic books herself. There it’s not even an estate, it is an author who still retains those right who just says, hey, look, I can do more and I can do better than the publishers can.

Me: Uh-huh, and it’s also kind of impressive that she’s going to be doing it without restrictive digital rights management.

Michael: Right.

Me: Basically it’s kind of funny, because all the people—including me—who’ve been complaining about for the longest time expected that when she did eventually come out with them they’d be in the same digital rights management formats that everybody uses and everybody who knows how cracks.

Michael: That’s it, that’s always been my response—whenever another author says to me, “What do you do with DRM?” it’s like, why? You know [it’ll get broken] the second you put it on—I’m not smarter than people who can crack this stuff. I use a form of “moral DRM” which just says, hey look, if you enjoyed this, come on, shoot me a couple of bucks. It’s a fair exchange. My feeling is that if you’re going to use my product for entertainment, and I give you five hours of entertainment, it’s really not too much for me to ask you to give me five bucks.

Me: I remember back in the early 2000s you wrote sort of a treatise on piracy in which you challenged would-be pirates to scan some rare out-of-print public domain works rather than the works that were readily pirated.

Michael: Right, right. Because I think, look, if you’re going to run a scanner, if you’re going to do that sort of thing and you can look at Project Gutenberg as basically doing that, then gosh, just do something useful. Bring a lot of this stuff back in. There’s some fantastic early science fiction which is out there and I love getting this stuff and reading it all to find—oh, this is the guy that Edgar Rice Burroughs was reading before I got to reading my stuff.

Me: I’m a big fan of Maurice Leblanc myself, the Arsène Lupin novels.

Michael: Oh sure, yeah.

Me: And it really depresses me that so many of them were written after 1923, and they may never get into the public domain, Mickey Mouse being what he is.

Michael: Well, ’23 shouldn’t be a problem. It’s about ’63, ’64. If your book was printed after Walt Disney died, the copyright is never going to get broken. If Walt Disney predeceased the author, it’s never going to come out. Doesn’t mean authors can’t make available, but…

Me: I find myself hoping eventually the public wakes up to what a travesty this extension of copyright is and does something about it, but it’s probably a pipe dream.

Michael: To be quite honest, I think the better place to attack it is not with the public because the public doesn’t pay attention to those things. I think the better place to attack it is with the authors. Think about the fact that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a number of other billionaires have all gotten together and pledged [that] while they’ll set some money aside for their heirs, they will donate the vast majority of their money to charitable stuff.

You could probably start a movement among authors to say, “I’m going to give orders to my literary estate that after I’m dead I’m going to let my work put my kids or grandkids through college. But twenty-five years after I die it goes into the public domain. And I think working with authors to do that is a lot more reasonable—a smaller audience and target audience that is going to be susceptible and reasonable to that particular thing. The reason you’ll never get a change in legislation is because Senators and Representatives write books.

And then I asked Tayler if he wouldn’t mind answering a few quick questions about how he monetized his webcomic, and what his e-book plans might be down the road. He graciously agreed. Here is the transcript:

Me: When you began Schlock Mercenary, what was your plan for monetizing your webcomic? Did you start it with the goal in mind of making a living from it, or was it just a hobby that grew into something more?

Howard: When I first started cartooning, I very quickly decided that I wanted to do this for a career, and began investigating possible business plans, and one that seemed to make the most sense was to find a publisher—build an audience, and then eventually find a publisher and make a living off of books. I thought that would take about ten years. It turned out that I found a publisher after four years, but I wasn’t going to be able to make a living selling books through that publisher because the audience wasn’t large enough. But if I self-published, I could make a living immediately.

And so that’s what we did—we self-published and made a living selling books ourselves. That’s always been the plan. That was ten years ago I first started thinking about that. For the last five years, we’ve operated under the assumption that we would always be able to sell books and other merchandise to Schlock Mercenary fans and we’d be able to make decent enough margins on it that we didn’t need to have half a million people reading the comic. We could get by with a hundred, two hundred thousand people reading the comic and maybe just a few thousand buying merchandise that would support the family.

Me: When you’re selling merchandise at conventions like this, do you make anything off it, or is it more of a break-even thing?

Howard: We make money. We definitely make money. We make enough money to pay for the booth, to pay back ourselves for paying for the booth last year, excuse me next year. We pay the manufacturing costs of the merchandise. We pay all of my travel expenses, you know, all those expenses factor into it. And after all that’s been factored in, we usually at least double our money. Shows where I can’t double my money or shows that are just really really stressful, I stopped doing. San Diego [ComiCon] is one of those shows because San Diego costs easily three times as much to do as any other show I’ve done. But GenCon is one of the more expensive shows I do but it’s still very very popular for us, and so we come.

Me: So, as e-books become more popular and print books start declining, do you think that’s going to affect your revenue model in the future?

Howard: The question is hugely loaded. You are suggesting that print books are going to start declining by virtue of e-books becoming more popular. Those are not cause and effect, and so I’m correcting the question. It is possible that print books will decline; it is possible this will happen as a result of the rise of e-books. What I suspect will happen, however, is that there will always be an audience for the sorts of print that I put together, and that I will continue to be able to make a living off of that. If that’s not the case, I can still make a perfectly good living selling electronic editions of Schlock Mercenary and we’ve already begun prototyping that kind of work.

Me: Even though you’ve still got the webcomic available for free?

Howard: Yes.

Me: So what formats are you going to be doing that in? PDF, EPUB?

Howard: We’ve looked at PDF and it’s only attractive for PCs; it doesn’t work well on any other device. EPUB and Mobi are not ideal because they don’t handle illustrations well, especially not full color. So we’re still prototyping. I’m not going to lock down a format now.

Me: Last question. You have earned a reputation for never missing an update. How do you do that?

Howard: I work several weeks ahead and I prioritize so that during the period in which the buffer is getting smaller, one of my highest priorities is to make sure that the buffer will get larger. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a bad mood, having a bad day, sick, whatever. If the buffer needs to be built, I go and I build it. I cowboy up and I get the job done. Sure, there are days when I don’t want to work, and decide not to. That’s fine, because I’m working several weeks ahead. When there are days when I really feel like working, I will sit down and jam and get a whole bunch of extra work done.

Me: All right, well great. Thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak to me.

Howard: You’re welcome!

I first learned about The Institute for the Future of the Book while working on a magazine assignment that eventually became this piece for The Millions. In getting to know Bob Stein, his colleagues and the projects they championed I became convinced that concerns about the death of reading and writing were deeply misplaced. What readers, writers, publishers and retailers really needed to worry about, and catch up with, was the increasing potential of what a book’s content could be, the delivery of the content and how we could interact with the content. Of course, plenty has changed in the intervening years and the Institute continues to instigate the exploration of ideas regarding the future of the book. I caught up with Stein over the phone for his take.

Direct to the Complete Interview

Note: This interview was reposted and available via Slate.

See Also: You can learn more about Bob Stein and the The Institute for the Future of the Book on their web site. Mr. Stein’s bio (a brief one) is available here.

See Also: if:book (The Institute for the Future of the Book Blog)

Via INFOdocket

Previously: Part One, Part Two

Me: You talked in the past about how the huge plot that you’ve woven together in Sluggy over the years has drawn toward a close. You said you didn’t want to start any new plot arcs until that was finished. What happens when it’s finished? Do you start another decade-long story arc?

Pete: That’s the thing, I have the freedom to make the choice at that point. That’s why, every time I’m asked the question I’ve never said definitively I’m going to stop the strip. I basically have to see where I am when I get there, because there’s definitely more stories I could be telling. But at this point there’s so many things that are unanswered, I almost want to answer everything, wrap everything up exactly the way I want to, and then see from that point where it will continue. And if it will continue. But as I’ve also said, at the rate I’m going, it’ll probably take ten more years for me to get there. So it’s not going away anytime soon.

Me: Something about Sluggy Freelance seems to be very polarizing in some ways. It seems a lot of people either love serious stuff and hate the broad parodies, or vice versa—so no matter what kind of story arc you’re doing, some significant fraction of your fandom is annoyed at any given time. Why do you think that is? Does it ever influence your decisions in writing scripts?

Pete: Well, I can answer the second part of that easier. No, it doesn’t influence me at all. I have a good gut instinct for what I want to do and how I want to do things. And I’ve been doing that for ten years, and there’s never been any time I could point to where fan influences caused me to adjust them. I started getting my first "you used to be great but now you suck" email around the vampire storyline, which I think was eight months in. And from then on, every time I do anything, there’s always somebody who’s very unhappy with it, and probably a large group of people who’s very unhappy with it and wish I would do what I had done the month before.

But…yeah, I don’t have anything deep to say about the fact that you can’t please all of the people all of the time with what you’re doing. But as I said, I’ve been doing this for ten years and making a living at it—thirteen years actually, thirteen years making a living at it, trusting my gut and writing the kind of stories that I want to in the in the way I want to so I don’t see the sense in me…I haven’t even considered exactly what the sense would be to try to guess what everyone would like that would please everybody. It just seems like a losing battle.

Sorry for that long, baffling answer. Feel free to cut it down to, like, a shorter version, like how about, "I dunno."

Me: Have you ever heard anything from people who created the original stories you’ve parodied, like JK Rowling or anybody like that?

Pete: Have I heard feedback from the people I’ve parodied?

Me: Yeah.

Pete: Not that I can remember. I might be missing something in there. I’m trying to access that brain file, and there’s like a flag on one of the folders but I can’t seem to open it at the moment. So, put that down as an, "I dunno."

Me: You’ve parodied Harry Potter. Any plans to do Twilight?

Pete: I would have to actually read Twilight and watch the movies of Twilight to do that. And as I said, I have so little time as it is. I’d probably besmirch it, though it seems very besmirchable. But, um, yeah. I don’t really have a good answer for that. I will say this, though. There’s currently a fans-only comic book, The Sampire. Sam is a vampire who hears about this other book called "Whineypire" in which the vampires—all the chicks are into those vampires and they sparkle. So he gets some glitter, spreads it on like Axe aftershave, and tries to pick up women covered in glitter based on that. So that’s as close as I’ve gotten to a parody of the Twilight saga.

Me: I seem to have come to the end of my prepared questions. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. It’s an amazing comic, I look forward to seeing what happens next.

Pete: I’ll look forward to telling you, and showing you.

Me: So, in the current 4U City storyline, was Brazil one of your influences there?

Pete: I’ve never seen the movie Brazil, actually. I’ve seen commercials for it, and it looks like it’s right up my alley.

Me: One of the elements of Brazil involves this plumber, and it always seemed like the pipe-fitting element in the 4U City story could have come from that.

Pete: Interesting. No, I haven’t seen that. In fact, I actually got an email from someone asking if the character I introduced today, Harbinger, came from Crisis on Infinite Earths. And I’ve never read that either, so I wasn’t exactly influenced by that, either. So yeah, there’s a lot of things that happen like that: no Brazil, no Crisis on Infinite Earths, just my crazy imagination.

Me: Thanks again for the interview, I really appreciate it.

Pete: No problem, Chris.

Previously: Part One

Me: How did you decide to start the Defenders of the Nifty program?

Pete: There again, that’s been going on so long I can’t remember exactly how it started. I guess it just came from the idea of, instead of just offering donations, kind of giving a little bit back to people who donate because, with the way I do business, it’s very hard to have merchandise bring in that much money because, well, for one thing, I’ve been ages behind on books; I’m trying to fix that. And the shirt design, maybe it sells, maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t sell then I have two good designs to make up for the one that didn’t work out so well. It’s kind of tricky in that way.

But with the Defenders of the Nifty membership, all the money goes straight to cover my expenses and pay me for the comic. The money doesn’t go to pay for the shirt materials, the merchandise, to put the stuff in the box and ship it—it all goes directly to the strip. So in that sense, it’s the single best way to support the strip and it’s been the biggest support. I think it’s like anything else in Sluggy, it just happened kind of organically. Just a concept that went through and worked really well.

Me: So does Defenders account for most of your revenue now?

Pete: Currently it’s most of my revenue. Of course, as I said I’m about seven years behind on books. Once I get some of those books out, maybe that would come into the running. Advertising has never really been a significant chunk of the money. Not so insignificant as I’d stop running ads, but advertising has always been an up and down kind of tug of war with me as far as profitability goes.

Me: How effective are the various referral programs from Amazon, Omaha Steaks, and so on? I actually ordered from Omaha Steaks from Sluggy, by the way. Very good steaks.

Pete: Yeah, I like Omaha. And Amazon has been actually kind of an unsung hero. That probably gets me more than the advertising combined. And it’s not like it costs anybody anything, they simply go through my link when they want to go shopping at Amazon. And I basically do probably about 90% of my Christmas shopping through Amazon. I wish I could use my own link, by the way—they won’t let you do that. Heh. Yeah, that’s been a huge win-win. I only remember to mention it around Christmas time, I’ll point out the link’s there, but every quarter it brings in a lot of money.

Me: Do you think there’s much of a future in web cartooning for a living for people who aren’t you?

Pete: No! You should all stop. Except for me. I’m allowed to keep going, everyone else stop.

Me: So, that aside, what advice would you give people trying to get started?

Pete: Run! <laughs> I have a lot of difficulty with that question because, as I said when I started there was almost nothing out there webcomics-wise. Now there’s tons of different things, and I’m not even aware of all of them. I mean, I always knew about Keenspot for example, and Keenspace was a place to go where new people could start up with their webcomics. Keenspace changed their name sometime back, I think, and I think there’s other competing sites with them, but you know, I just draw pictures in my cave, I don’t get out much, so I’m not aware of what a new webcartoonist has as options, and I don’t know which ones are good and which ones are bad. But there’s a lot of smarter people than I am doing this and figuring out how to make a living doing it, so better to ask them. Or better yet, take up another occupation, like logging!

Me: So do you think the newspaper industry could learn any lessons from webcartoonists when it comes to making free online content pay?

Pete: I don’t know, if you’re talking about newspaper comic strips that’s different than the newspapers themselves. At this point I think newspapers are losing a lot of money because there’s so many sources for news. They’re all over the place. And how do you get your news I don’t think is as important as the fact that I worry about the level of journalism we’re getting. Like people going into journalistic profession and hunt down stories and hunt down truth instead of grabbing newsbites from each other and just putting the same stuff up there. I want to make sure we still have journalists doing what they’re doing and find a way to get them to get paid for what they’re doing whether it be on print newspapers or on websites, what-have-you. So I’m not worried about the newspapers, I’m worried about journalists.

Me: Do you read e-books, or would you if you had the time? What hardware do or would you use?

Pete: I don’t have a lot of experience with the different devices, but from what I’ve seen…I’ve seen the Kindle and I’ve seen the iPad and both of them seem to do a really good job of letting you sit back with a book in your lap and read it. Kind of the old-fashioned way with new-fashioned technology. So, I don’t know. I’d have to find time to read books first. So little time in my life. I have not picked up a book in ages. But yeah, so I can’t really commit to one of the book readers at this point.

Me: Now I know this is a bit of an odd question given the electronic nature of Sluggy already, but have you ever considered making Sluggy Freelance e-books available, like in CBR files or PDFs?

Pete: Yeah, I’ve considered it. There’s more of a time issue. I think there’s probably a lot of opportunities for that, but my options time-wise to investigate them are very limited. So, something like that can happen at any point. It’s definitely something I’m considering but until I have time to look at the options, I can’t commit to anything particular. Right now I’m trying to get them into just print.

[To be concluded!]

On May 28th, I sat down with Pete Abrams at the ConQuesT SF convention in Kansas City for an interview about his webcomic, Sluggy Freelance. Sluggy is a rarity in that it is one of relatively few webcomics that provides its artist’s entire living, and it has also been in operation for over 14 years (13 as of the interview).

Abrams has been interviewed in a number of places already, and I tried to avoid covering the same territory as the others. Further, I wanted to get into how he was able to earn a living from giving his comic away free on the Internet when so few others have been able to do that.

I will be running this interview in three parts, starting today.

Me: So, for the first part of this interview: There’s this whole thing going on right now about paywalls in the electronic newspaper industry. Everyone’s complaining about how giving content away for free is killing the newspaper industry and so forth. You’ve made a living giving content away for free for over ten years.

When did you first think that it might be possible for you to do Sluggy Freelance as a full-time, paying job?

Pete: Well, when I started Sluggy Freelance, webcomics wasn’t anything like it is right now. I mean, there were very few strips in existance. So there wasn’t anyone else’s strip to compare myself to and ask myself if I could make a living doing it or how long it would take. When I started, I knew that most businesses took two to three years to become profitable—I heard that at some point. And when I started the strip, I made it daily and I treated it like it was my profession before it was paying me full-time.

And sure enough, what happened was in about the third year I suddenly started making a profit and was able to support myself at that point, and it’s been growing in profitability every year since then. So I didn’t know if I could make a living doing it or how long it would take, because there was no business model to possibly compare it to.

Me: What challenges did you face getting started?

Pete: It’s an interesting question. It’s tough to put my brain back almost thirteen years to what was I worrying about at that time. I know one of my biggest stresses was trying to upload the Sunday comic strips through a dial-up—they kept corrupting every other jpeg that went to the server and I had to re-upload it 18 times. I remember many times cursing and yelling about that.

Me: Was it hard surviving two years or so until Sluggy became profitable?

Pete: Oh, no. I was in a very good situation, because at that time I was doing web design—I was doing it freelance and I had a number of clients. And they were paying the bills and it was a good thing. What happened was that as Sluggy grew, I simply could turn down more and more jobs and reach kind of an equilibrium.

Unlike "normal" people with "real" jobs, where when they decide to make a transition to make a living with their webcomic, they have to quit their 9 to 5 and cross their fingers, I was able to do a gradual shift into it, so it was never an uncomfortable situation. I’m lucky in a lot of ways.

Me: Did it change the experience of writing and drawing for you to know you couldn’t just slack off if you got bored with it? That it was something you had to keep doing and couldn’t slack off or just stop if you got bored?

Pete: I suppose I know to this day I could slack off if I get bored—it’s because of me setting my own rules. At some point I didn’t realize I couldn’t stop doing it because I can’t. I still control everything that goes on on the website 100%. I could stop doing the comic tomorrow, or I could turn it all animé, I could do whatever I want. I have that freedom. But I also have my own personal rules and strictures I kind of set myself, and I don’t see any reason to go messing it up.

Me: Has it ever been hard for you to keep it up for 13 years?

Pete: A lot of people ask where the ideas come from, and they normally frame the question in that sense: how do you keep coming up with stuff after all these years. I’ve always found…there’s always been so much to play with in the Sluggy universe.

In a lot of ways, you almost train your readership what to expect from you, so people who do strips that are all based on I.T. or video games or something like that—they lock themselves into a particular type of genre whereas I pretty much established from the get-go that I could go in any direction. That gave me a flexibility that means every time there’s a blank sheet of paper in front of me, it’s exciting for me because I can go anywhere. I can do Tarzan. I can do wild west. I can do video games. I can do I.T. I can explore whatever I’m really interested in at that moment and that keeps it continuously fresh for me.

Now your specific question said is it hard to keep it up over all these years and the problem I run into is keeping on top of the workload so that there is a new strip every day with sketch content on weekends, and the strips are still up to par where I want them to be. It just seems like as I get older, life and family and events and other things seem to make it hard for me to keep up my schedule. Which means I have to run filler material or hopefully I’ll find something like guest artists which are much better than my filler material.

But yeah, that’s gotten harder year after year. But the concepts and the writing and the love of doing the job—absolutely not. It’s been fantastic since it started, and still love it.

[To be continued!]

 

The mobile phone is emerging as an important way for people to read; indeed, in Asian countries, authors are already writing specifically for phone owners. The challenge is writing in smaller chunks — so the reader is not required to read for extended periods on a smaller screen and can easily resume where he/she left off. For poetry, this isn’t a problem, but what about fiction? Does limiting chapter length to (for example) 400 or 500 words reduce the dramatic or literary potential for the story writer?

 I don’t know — I like the rhetorical short jab (Obama mastered it by dropping his voice to briefly pause after every 5 to 15 words, suggesting conclusiveness, authority & mastery of the material, & this unfortunately got him elected). As for the technical modifications: I’m at a loss. I like to tell people that I’m still getting used to electric lights. A touch of hyperbole there, but I also collect antiquarian books.

Do you think the ideas that led to your stories (and novels) could have been repurposed into bite-sized chunks for a cell phone?

Only in the sense that a story’s or novel’s key situation can sometimes be contracted into one or two sentences. I once wrote a condensed version of Petronius‘ Widow of Ephesus in 200 words (see below). This works beautifully for what it is; for what it is not (i.e., a fully textured narrative), it doesn’t. Sound like double talk? Yes & no.

THE WIDOW OF EPHESUS

(From the SATYRICON, as retold by Jack Matthews. Read the original version by Petronius).

Long ago, when the Romans ruled the earth, a rich merchant died, and his young widow was so bereaved that she accompanied him to his tomb, saying that the prospect of life without him was unendurable, and she would starve herself to death.

Near the tomb stood a soldier, guarding the corpse of a criminal that had been nailed to a cross. From where he stood, the soldier could see through the portal of the tomb, and the sight of the young widow aroused his passion, for she was beautiful.

Eventually, he took some of his food to her, asking her to eat; but she refused, saying that she was determined to join her husband in death. But the soldier persisted, until eventually the young widow accepted some of the food he offered and ate. Then the two of them began to talk of various things, until finally–even in the cold darkness of the tomb–they began to feel a mutual passion which led to their making love.

When the soldier emerged from the tomb, however, he saw that the family of the dead criminal whose body he had been guarding had stolen his corpse from the cross so that they could bury it decently. Seeing this, the soldier said to the widow, "Now it is all over for me, because according to the law, I will be executed and my corpse will be hung in his place."

"No," she said. "Take my dead husband’s body and put it there. I have lost one love, but I will not lose another."

Note:

Could this story be developed into a short story of conventional length? Of course: the scenes could be boxed and extended; the pace could be slowed, the texture (diction, "style") enriched and elaborated, the point of view could be negotiated (change in POV is often a fault, but only because it isn’t done well; it can be done with grace and elegance), a sub-plot could be introduced, and all of the materials of "pointedness" could be brought in to enrich and broaden the story–which will, of course, then be not the same story at all but a different story utilizing what is essentially the same key situation..

Also note the narrative turns that structure this little story, each turn signified by a new paragraph. Paragraphing is an art in itself, a way of designing the story the way a musical score serves as a structural device for that other temporal art of music.

Would the effort to turn Anna Karenina into bite-sized chunks for the Iphone be only an interesting-but-futile exercise?

 More futile than interesting, I suspect.

Booking in the Heartland (1986) has an essay, "Library of Ignorance," where you ask, "will any conceivable sort of electronic gadgetry prove useful in understanding the subtleties of language and custom implicated in the works of Anthony Trollope or Henry James? Could anybody seriously argue that the availability of such electronic means would have enlarged or enriched their own clear and complex vision of life? … The electronic revolution has done nothing to invalidate the old truths, just as it has not provided any new means for exposing any of the old idiocies that have permeated and probably always will permeate the human condition." You expressed this skepticism about technology in 1986. 20+ years later, have you had any reason to revise your views? Has the internet and email substantially altered the individual’s ability to understand and appreciate literature?

I still think and feel pretty much the same way. In one of my essays, "What Should We Do With The Past?" I argue about the necessity for understanding what and who have gone before. I like Hamlet’s implied definition of humankind as "a creature large in discourse, looking before and after" (note that the "before and after" can mean their very opposites,  depending upon our perspective, because from within, ”before” is the Future; from without, it’s the Past. And, hey, isn’t that fun?

 How closely do you follow recent current events and popular culture? For example: Michael Jackson’s death. Global warming. Octomom. The latest Harry Potter movie. The new Iphone. The American Idol competition. H1n1. The Iranian protests. Facebook?

I find the Press terminally stupid and obnoxious. The INCREDIBLE attention given to Michael Jackson (what did he ever do but transform himself into a marionette & manage to whirl around with a microphone in his paw?)–did he walk on water? I’ve never read the Harry Potter novels, but my wife likes them. And I saw one of the movies, which struck me as a typically mindless Hollywood production with the implied audience of an 11-year-old boy, and I don’t mean a bright 11-year-old boy. The American Idol — I’ve only heard of it. The Iranian protests? Lamentable. I feel for the protesters. "Octomom" is an obscenity; the world’s worst crisis is over-population, and some air-wit like this whelps 8 of the little puppies? And the physician who presided over the blessed event is an even greater obscenity.

Some of the media attention given to figures like Michael Jackson may be driven by the music industry eager to sell more cds. However, the public still responds with intense interest to these shared narratives. Is something seriously wrong with that?

There’s some validity to what you say, of course. I contributed an essay to a book of writers responding to 9/11; I titled it, "Reaching For The Other Hand"–referring to what I call "the Men/De Principle" — focusing upon 2 small words in classical Greek, men/de–men meaning "on the one hand" & de meaning "on the other hand"; I like to tell my students that all of European civilization has grown out of these 2 words, which are the source of philosophy, dialectic, democracy (all Greek words), trial by jury and the 2-party system. Thus, interesting questions and the answers to implicit ones, are almost invariably subject to men/de qualifications, as are my thesis, above, and your antithesis.

Nowadays audio books, story podcasts and live storytelling events have thrust the story creator into the additional role as performer. I personally feel that some stories benefit by not being read aloud. What are your thoughts?

I think you’re right, although I don’t think language should ever lose its echo in sound. The cult of speed reading, as it flourished a few decades ago, was an egregious folly in this way. I wrote a brief poem once about a speed reader who read a sonnet in a few seconds. Implicit in this folly, I think, are the notions that reading is an escape from life and there is a mystical entity — "content" — that somehow exists independently of the language. Reading is an enlargement of life, not an escape; & the words, including their sounds, ARE the content. What else could “content” be?

As for reading in silence: I think the great power of good fiction is best released by one’s own personal voice being cast for the part of narrator.

You’ve taught several generations of writing students at Ohio University. What trends have you have noticed in the writing of your students over the last decade (in terms of subject matter, genre, style, etc)?

Hard to say. Sci Fi & Fantasy are big with them, but I’m not sure they’re bigger now than several decades back. I think one rather heartbreaking but ridiculous, problem I find so often is the naiveté of students about what’s involved in making a good story. Maybe in high school they’ve been praised as "imaginative" by an assistant basketball coach who had to take over an English course because he spoke English , and now they think they’re gifted writers and the world’s eager to read their infatuations. A lazy and benighted self-infatuation is pretty hard to work with; of course, as writers, we’re all egotists — but then, non-writers are, also. Schopenhauer understood this. What alternative is there for a human being, when all we know is what we are? Here’s a versicle I wrote on the subject:

ASTROPHYSICAL

	Cosmologists have theorized or guessed
	that all the atoms, molecules and quarks
	of the universe itself were once compressed
	into some utter density of matter
	only slightly larger than a grapefruit sphere.
	We're used to being astonished by such patter
	from scientists; but still we're dazed
	by the utter extravagance of this strange notion--
	to think that mountains, continents and trees,
	and stars and moons and semi-trucks and oceans
	could all be packed into so small a space . . .
	how can one conceive of such a place?
	I think the only vessel that might contain
	such enormities is the human brain--
	a little larger than a grapefruit, I'll admit,
	but for the magnitude of worlds, a perfect fit.

It’s hard (and perhaps futile) to teach writing in a creative writing class. Can you mention a few favorite writing tips you give to your students?

First, I like to analyze the familiar question: "Can you teach Creative Writing?" Seems simple and sensible, but it contains 3 variables: 1) whom are you asking, 2) who will be taught, & 3) exactly what do you mean by "teach"? In my classes I like to emphasize the importance of absorbing great continents of information. All stories, no matter how fanciful, consist of information, and it behooves a serious young writer to simply know a hell of a lot so s/he can draw upon it for fictioning. Also, dig deep until you touch the mystery of things; as Ford Madox Ford (I think it was) said, "Upon close examination, a good literary style will consist of a lot of small surprises." And where do those surprises come from but an ability to pluck from the riches in a mind’s lexicon?

One of my favorite assignments, however, is what I call a “piggy-back journal”—students are asked to choose sentences about the craft of writing taken from the published notebooks, diaries and journals of established writers, then write a sentence or two in response.

Blogging tools and the Internet makes it easy to publish online. Do you counsel your writing students to avoid publishing too much or too quickly on the web?

I don’t know enough about it to caution them. I’m a little antsy about the whole thing, but part of that is simply a reflection of my grumpy old age & of course one’s natural fear of the unknown.

Nanowrimo (National Writing Month) is a crazy literary activity where those who sign up resolve to write a 50,000 word novel in November. It has become very popular among young writers, if only for its community aspects. If asked, would you recommend this type of exercise for your creative writing students? Why or why not?

 I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it. In many ways, I’m a dinosaur — although a happy one. Sometimes almost as dumb as "Tommy Tyrannosaurus" — a name I’ve actually come upon in the sickening, Disney-ish attempt to cute-ify everything within reach, or without. I once wrote a short story featuring Tommy T. and Trixie Triceratops. I sent it out and it was rejected as being "too silly"-but of course that’s what I INTENDED! Ah, well.

Let me rephrase that question. Is it good for a young writer to have an excuse to plunge into a project of novel length (even if it’s only for practice)?

I think anything that invites you to "plunge into a project" is good, or has the potential to be good; we have a lot of mistakes to get out of our systems before we can do justice to the high art of prose.

A related trend in Internet writing is "shared universes" (where different writers create fiction that share common settings or characters in the same literary universe). Literary collaboration has worked fairly well in drama and TV/film, but what about novels and stories? Are you comfortable with the idea of a fiction writer subsuming his own literary ideas within a shared universe for the sake of increasing exposure?

These all seem hopelessly gimmicky to me, and yet there’s obviously some vigorous imagination at work . . . and I suspect a lot of fun. So, who knows? I don’t. Although I can profess a certain distrust in literary collaboration. Writing is such a chest-pounding thing.

I just finished HANGER STOUT, AWAKE  (which you published in 1967, to some acclaim). This simple naive voice plus the subject matter (cars, girls, and an unusual contest) makes me wonder if the ideal reader should be an 8th grade boy. Did you write this with the intention of attracting a younger audience?

In a way, an 8th grader could respond to it. Years ago I bought the plates from Harcourt and paid to have 3000 copies printed, which I sold out easily. Most of them sold to colleges and high schools, and I remember doing a phone interview with students at a high school in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In another sense, however, I think someone like Hanger (i.e., any young person) would be far less privileged in understanding the novel. The distance of age is required to understand much of his innocence and brave integrity (cf. McLuhan’s "I don’t know who discovered the ocean, but I know it wasn’t a fish.’) It’s all a matter of perspective.

I regard Hanger as more character-driven than plot-driven. But as I read, I had no idea what details were important or what was going to happen next! You finished Hanger at an interesting place — with many things left unresolved. Were you tempted to ratchet up the melodrama or continue the novel past where it ends?

Good. I toyed with the idea of doing a sequel, but decided against it. In my privately printed edition, published a decade or so after the novel came out, I wrote that I didn’t know what Hanger was then doing or how he was getting along, but I figured he’d be all right. In short, he is a survivor, to use the fashionable term.

Hanger revolves around a strange idea for a spectator sport — seeing how long a person could hang by his hands. Where did you get the idea for this imaginary sport? From real life? Also, wouldn’t this kind of sport be very dangerous? (It seems to cause hallucinations).

I like the idea of hanging as simple dumb, though intelligent, endurance. "Hang in there" — which I seem to remember someone saying tomb somewhere in the novel.

 Can you talk about the titles for your story collections and how they relate to the stories inside them?

 This could be a long essay. A title should function significally (a thing representing a thing) and symbolically (a thing representing a non-thing — an abstraction, or feeling, something that can’t be experienced directly through the senses). It’s a moment of truth when it’s a statement a writer has to make about what s/he has written. Insofar as a title both exemplifies and resists the book it labels it is interestingly ambiguous, ironic and oblique.

TALES OF THE OHIO LAND (1978) uses legends and historical facts as a springboard for short stories. What was your goal for these stories?

 I love legends and love rural, small-town Ohio. I like Frost’s statement that he likes a man who savors of the land he comes from. Shirley Ann Grau wrote me a wonderful fan letter, generously praising the stories. Hey, I liked that. (She was pretty famous at one time; but, of course, all fame is of a time.

The Ohio stories seem more like folklore and geared towards a general audience. In "Lucinda Hill is Born Again", the Johnny Appleseed character even has a wonderful cameo as a sage. Do you regard Johnny Appleseed as vital to that particular story, or was it just a delicious bit of historical frosting?

I find Johnny Appleseed very interesting, as all legends are by definition. I have an early 19^th century  book inscribed by Nathaniel Chapman, his brother who crossed the Alleghenies into Ohio with Johnny. The two were Swedenborgians, and  I used to teach at Urbana College, in Ohio, a Swedenborgian school.

One of my favorite Matthews stories, "Poison" is about a supermarket manager who has to mediate a conflict between his workers. The story has lovely touches (lyricism, great dialogue and characters). But it would also be a great story to use for a business management class. When you are playing around with a story idea, do you spend a lot of time imagining what kind of reader might want to read a particular story (and why this person would want to read it)?

No, I don’t think about the reader; I think about my characters and the theme and the adventure that emerge literally under my hands. I dedicate  READING MATTER, my most recent book about books, to "my imagined readers, most of whom are dead." Sadly true — which is one reason I so very much appreciate your interest.

Last night I finished "Betrayal of the Fives", a whimsical short story about a man who is admitted to a secret society with an unknown purpose and membership. Perhaps it is not a typical Matthews story, but it is definitely one of the funniest. Where do you get your sense of humor?

Humor is intrinsic to language itself, for every word denotes a type, no two tokens of which are alike. So when we hear of a librarian, we get something of an image in our minds, & then find out that he’s a biker with a beard, tattoos on his forearms & a missing ear . . . well, the disparity between image & reality is the essence of irony, and it is possessed of the energy of humor.

(Later Matthews  attached a poem from his verse  book, SCHOPENHAUER AGONISTES, saying that it  "articulates my theory far better than my original answer).

Schopenhauer’s Reflections Upon Humor

	In effect, he argued that every word denotes a class,
	But the members of that class are all unique,
	tellingly different from one another--no two beetles
	are alike, no shoes or sneezes--and when we speak
	of justice, liberty, love or similar abstractions,
	who can clearly understand what then is meant?
	"Liberty" can signify mere selfishness and greed,
	And yet, the word remains the same, indifferent
	To the use it's been corrupted to promote.
	And the word "love" will never literally apply
	To more than one such passion that enflames
	The loins and lays the heart to siege.
	It's in this theory that one begins to sense
	The principle which signifies that there is irony
	Inherent simply in the way words work,
	For nothing ever named can fit the name,
	And in the soberest speech there is some quirk
	Of comical discrepancy. That irony is intrinsic
	To the very language that defines our world
	Is a proud discovery. And so it is that ever after,
	In every word we speak, the intellect hears laughter.

Can you talk about your most recent projects?

My most recent story collection "Abruptions" is still seeking a publisher. (I’ve sent out queries a few times, but without success; and now I’m not even sure whom I’ve approached. I’m not good at marketing my work.) While the word “abruptions” is an archaism, I define the word for my purposes here as “very short stories that end abruptly”; and I suggest that they can be thought of as constituting  something of  a new sub-genre, with the limitations and genius that all genres possess by simply being what they are. Although these stories are widely miscellaneous, there are a few secret nuances I’ve programmed into the score: in addition to certain recurring themes and motifs, I’ve chosen 88 stories, to correspond to the number of keys on the piano, taking  whimsical pleasure in its reflecting the kinship of music and literature as temporal arts, and more substantively, designing the “book-end” character of the collection, with the first and last stories sharing the ancient theme of something in the way of revelation falling from the sky, pretty much like story ideas. To be sure, these nuances may seem a bit recherché, but readers can, of course, find nourishment in the stories as stories without an awareness of the food chemistry. My most recent published book is SCHOPENHAUEROVA VULE, a Czech language translation of SCHOPENHAUER’S WILL, brought out by H&H Publishers in Prague. This is something of an anomaly because it has yet to be published in English (one editor rejected it, saying it was "too experimental and too cerebral" — the latter reason a rather odd one, perhaps, for rejecting a novel about a philosopher; but that’s what she said, and I have no reason to doubt her good will). Perhaps a more cogent reason, however, is the fact that the book is somewhat freakish — not exactly fiction, biography or philosophy, but a mélange of all of these (with a one-act play thrown in). I’ve been told that my next novel, THE GAMBLER’S NEPHEW, will be published by The Etruscan Press in 2011.

Coming Next: Jack Matthews Interview 5 (Cultural and Literary Trends).

What do you do or where do you go to get away from writing and literature?

 I collect old and rare books. When I was younger, I jogged, but quit after a bone spur in my heel talked me into it. And I’ve always loved to drive — years ago, I calculated that at that time I had actually driven over a million miles in cars.

 One of your bios mention that you and your wife used to store your book collection in an old saloon, "bought for that purpose and located in a small southeastern Ohio mining town." What’s the story behind that? Do you still own the saloon?

We’ve just, in the past month, sold the old place on a land contract. Before that, I sold the books in the store (about 10 to 15 thousand at each sale) to Mike Riordan, a  friend from Hell, Michigan (yep, that’s where he was from). He’s  the retired captain of a nuclear sub who’s now crazy about the book game; the last I heard, he had accumulated over 300,000 of them. (He and his wife  Janet  have moved to Colorado.)

 I realize that your wife is a book nut too, but has she ever suggested getting rid of half of the books in your house to free up space?

My dear wife has the typical housekeeper’s passion for cleanliness & order, so she’s occasionally exasperated by my own passion for scooping up books. Her own collecting is rather passive; but she has a special interest in children’s books & Gone with the Wind stuff.  (Ed. note: He answers the question more fully in a recent   radio interview (mp3)) .

 You extol book collecting as a kind of recreational activity, almost like gambling. Aside from the occasional wacko, are book collectors generally sane and financially responsible people?

No, I think we’re all a bit unbalanced — but happily so. It’s a passion that has no limits; who could ask for better?

Can you talk about a recent book acquisition you are proud of?

Not a specific book, but I’ve been gathering up mint 1st editions of Christopher Morley, a vastly underrated author in my opinion, so he can be collected inexpensively, which is my favorite price…

In your essay, Collecting by Chance, you say, "the psychological rewards of aleatory choice are considerable." Explain. Many of your inspirations and literary interests come from books you’ve encountered during your book collecting in Ohio. But if you lived in Texas or Nevada, wouldn’t you end up coming across totally different books during your book treks?

I’d still find a lot of books to go through. I can’t get stopped. Earlier today, I hit some nearby thrift stores & came back with 16 books. Nothing, alas, to light up the world, but they’re books, after all. (We have a pole barn to store the little rascals in.)

Let me ask an indelicate question. You are 84 and own lots of strange and remarkable books — many of which you will never have time to read. Does this knowledge depress you?

No, I’m not depressed by the fact. I take pleasure in living amidst so many microcosms, each one of which bears witness to its own slice of the world. Without such amplitude, the spirit would wither and desiccate like a demoralized walnut.

I like to think of a personal collection as the creation of one’s own, symbolically charged environment. In one of my books I bounce off Candide’s famous conclusion, pointing out that a personal library is an intellectual’s garden. What could we cultivate that is more interesting,  meaningful and telling?

 In COLLECTING RARE BOOKS FOR PLEASURE AND PROFIT (1977), you wrote, "books possess individual personalities; they possess interiors much like the interiors of human beings, and every bit as varied… Multiply this inner amplitude by the thousand and more volumes that are required for the modest beginnings of a personal library, and you can see what rich cacophonies and babbles, or what splendid symphonies and chamber music can result." With the abundance of titles being published, is there a danger of books bringing too much cacophony? When searching through stacks of quantity, isn’t it natural for people to seek well-known brands denoting quality?

No danger in cacophony. We’re pathetically one & limited & can absorb all the varieties of our environment according to what we need. Even without thinking on’t.

On the surface, BOOKING IN THE HEARTLAND (1986) is a series of yarns about the strange books you have encountered during book collecting. But you read these books as closely as scholars might read Shakespeare or Henry James. Yet, at the same time you seem to be laughing at the same books you are analyzing; is your goal in writing these essays to encourage others to read these very books?

They’re all testimonials, of a sort. I once told a reporter (doing a piece on our old defunct saloon we’d converted into a sort of "bookstore") that I felt like a missionary to the 20th century. Now, if rumors are correct, it’s the 21st. We all bear witness, no matter who we are, or when & where & how.

As for my “laughing at them”: laughter is part of how I try to cope with the world, & it has to do with language, which is intrinsically ironic. That is, every word denotes a type, whereas no two of its tokens are alike. We gather these great heterogeneous multiplicities of tokens together into a word, but the members of the population so seldom match the image we have of the type that the disparity is almost always, & to some extent, ironic. Funny.

 Given that many bibliophiles engage in the sport of book collecting, should authors make books with an eye towards their collectibility?

I’m not sure that any “should”— but it’s possible that some think this way. A beautifully designed book is a work of art, after all; but perhaps such elegance should be confined to a small percentage of highly sophisticated, "literary" works or beautifully designed illustrated books.

Apart from your essays on book collecting, you haven’t written any memoirs or autobiographical essays. Can a case be made for having more "creative fiction" and less "creative nonfiction"?

My bibliophilic essays teem with personal adventures and are in this sense, fragments of memoirs .. . And, yes, I like memoirs — notebooks, journals, diaries — all sorts of personal testimony when one isn’t consciously inventing, but inventing, anyway, for the memory is a story teller — held together in Christopher Morley’s grand phrase — by "cobweb analogies".

Coming Next: Jack Matthews Interview Part 4: Projects Past and Present

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Creativity finds its natural expression in the generation and testing of hypotheses. Actually, it has more to do with the generation than the testing, but we’ll leave the testing part in, for-like the Background to the Opening Scene phases in a story, it cannot be easily distinguished from the generation. Even as we spin an idea, a cadre of analysts in the mind’s bureaucracy are busily probing it and assessing it for its worth.

The words “What if” signal the release of a question or hypothesis, and with it, the imagination. “What if a man awakens one morning to find that his wife has left him?” Is this a good idea?  Well, possibly. It’s hard to tell. Why is it hard to tell? Because it’s too vague. Already, dullness has crept in. Rather, nothing has crept in, and nothing has yet come alive. Why not? Because the idea remains too abstract, too featureless.

So what is one to do? Well, several things are possible. No two writers will bring this idea to life in the same way, and what might be perfect for one, will be deadly dull for the other. Still, there are changes and additions that will unquestionably improve it. Consider this one: “What if Burton Fife, a 78 year old retired fireman, awakes one morning to find that his wife, Phyllis, has left him?”

Is this better? It is. It’s more real, more concrete, more precise. No man is simply a man: all are individual men, with individual names, and whatever happens to them, it will happen at a particular age. And if we change Burton Fife’s name to “Kirk Wolker,” we create a new set of probabilities. Probabilities for whom? For the writer, first; and then, for those later readers who will participate in the story’s meaning.

Of course there are generational codes in the names. Today, Burton Fife will likely be 78 years old, but Kirk Wolker will probably be 32. How can I know this? Well, look around and listen. But are such generational codes always reliable? Of course not; but if you shift their ages, making Kirk 78 and Burton 32, be aware that you are working against stereotypes as they are fixed in the generational codes of proper names. Yes, but are such stereotypes important? Of course they are. Stereotypes are always true, they’re just not true enough.

Note that the information supplied to bring the man in this “what if” alive is information about his name and his age. These are two of the most important things to be known about a character. For a variety of often quite mysterious reasons, names function almost like a genetic (as well as generational) code. You and I may not agree about what the name “Nellie Powers” connotes, and in fact neither of us may be able to describe clearly what this connotation is (I certainly can’t); but the name will nevertheless have a specific rightness for an author.

People are not simply denoted by their names, but to some extent defined by them, in every name there is an onomastic code. A new-born girl named “Nellie” will have a slightly different life from one named “Charity.” Why? Because we are born into a language as we are born into a world that features gravity and the oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle. Her name will affect other people, and thereby Nellie/Charity herself. Is this fair? Whether it’s fair or not is irrelevant; but the answer is, it probably isn’t fair. And yet, what is? Is it fair that some children should be born genetically rich, while others are genetically poor?

Which name will be more helpful in sliding that little hypothetical girl without friction into today’s world? You’re right; not Nellie. But is it possible that Nellie might prove a “good” name? It all depends. You pay a price for everything, and the price you pay for giving your modern little infant girl a nice old-fashioned name may be a constant inhibition to her (“I just hate my name!” Nellie may cry when she’s fifteen), or it may be a source of strength (“You know, your name’s really different!” people may say to her, and she may accept this comment proudly).

While little Nellie’s scenario provides an interesting study in onomastics, it may not seem to concern us as writers. But of course it does. As writers, our most intimate connection with our characters is through their names. Decades ago, I wrote a story about a nurse named “Avis,” who lived in an old gothic house on the shores of Lake Erie, where she had custody over a microcephalic idiot named Wilbur Postlewaite. Shortly after I wrote this story, the slogan “Avis Tries Harder” was developed by a car rental agency and often repeated on TV ads. So I changed the name of my character to “Cleo.” Did that make a difference? Indeed it did; I could feel the force of it ripple throughout the whole story, which means I had to change other things in the story that in my imagination were more fitting for a “Cleo” than an “Avis.” The story was eventually published, whereupon it fell into some great and noble silence.

Many authors rail against  the inanities and injustices  of the literary marketplace; Jack Matthews plays it like  a  game. And if you’re playing, it’s a lot more fun to play as a book collector than as an author. The book collecting sport is part treasure hunt (Matthews calculated  that over his lifetime he had driven more than    a million miles in search of books) and part casino. Which books are likely to appreciate in value and which ones are likely to plummet? These are fundamentally economic and recreational questions, not literary ones. Jack Matthews is a cheerful capitalist (delightfully bargaining people down and unapologetic about showing up at estate sales to buy rare books from clueless relatives of the deceased). Although Matthews is primary a fiction writer,  his 1977  best selling book Collecting Rare Books for Pleasure and Profit is a practical guide for how to turn an expensive hobby into an occasionally lucrative pastime.

First and foremost, Matthews believes that books are economic creations:

Even the finest, most beautiful, most desirable books have cost money; they have been paid for at sometime, by someone; even if they were lovingly constructed by one man, from the papermaking to the designing and casting of the type, and then bestowed upon others as gifts, somebody had to pay for the raw materials and previous workmanship. We live in that kind of world. It is, among other things, an economic world, and any object that possesses – or is considered to possess – value is likely to wear some kind of price tag. Whatever has a price tag shows some character and potential as an investment. (CRBFPAP, p 55)

When he once asked author and bookstore owner Larry McMurtry what he thought about investing in rare books, McMurtry replied, “We don’t like customers who regard books as investments. Also I don’t like being collected, although I like being read.” Matthews sardonically adds,

Unquestionably, the rest of us should feel grateful for the existence of such high-minded folks; they make the world just a little better for all of us. (CRBFPAP, p 57)

Rare books are generally not thought to be reliable investments, but that is missing the point.  The most impressive “investments “  are old books which are bought for pennies and sold later for higher prices. Matthews rejects the claim that collecting rare books ignores their true literary or spiritual value. What  silliness! He adds:

It is a similar silliness to pretend that buying books “as an investment” is incompatible with scholarship or the true love of literature; Quite the contrary; it is the man who divides his love of literature from the material life who is the true heretic, using only the public library or the niggardly functional paperback for the leavening of his sensibility, and investing his money in Ford Motor Company and AT&T stock. What a dreary divarication is this, and how schizoid and truly mercenary is the man who plays such a nasty game against himself! To invest in books does not imply that the collector intends to sell them; he merely buys them with the conviction that his taste in honoring them will be validated by posterity and that – with effort and know-how comparable to those of other investors – this validation will have a dimension of financial profit.  The investment aspect of collecting is utterly fascinating, for it carries with it the excitement of competition in skill, expertise and taste. Often, too, there is the added excitement of the chase, in the auction room, the book fair and in the “field,” tracking down literary manuscripts, letters or rare titles.  (CRBFPAP, p 6-77)

Part of the reward is the fun inherent in collecting. Matthews writes:

The way to be happy, an unhappy man once claimed, lies in being occupied with the perfectly trivial. Happiness is itself not at all trivial, however, even though its poor cousins pleasure and entertainment may be considered so. What explains the mania some people have for collecting such objects as rocks, empty whiskey bottles, noncirculating coins, carnival glass, butterfly corpses, and old dueling pistols? Quite independent of any aesthetic value, and independent of any negotiable value they might acquire because of the similar passions of others, there is a simple joy in collecting them. This joy to collect seems intrinsic, for very young children possess it and soon extend the simple delights of touching and owning to include those more sophisticated delights of building and ordering.  (CRBFPAP, p 13)

But the journey is also part of the fun. When  hunting for books, you are usually not seeking a specific title but simply awaiting the unexpected.  Leaving things open to chance relieves the individual of the burden of decision-making and opens new adventurous possibilities:

The psychological rewards of aleatory choice are considerable. Independent of any rational defensible premise for belief, there are symbolic reasons for employing it. However, entered upon, and whatever the consequences, the quasi fatalism inherent in such behavior is balm to us as we blunder wild-eyed and panting through the daily jungle of decisions. Balm, and something like sanity. (Booking in the Heartland, p107)

That leaves the individual book collector with a sense of destiny:

…when Heliodorus’s book and I were introduced, two histories converged: one of over three and a half centuries and the other somewhat less. As a book collector, I find myself verging upon a superstitious belief in signs. If I hadn’t stopped at that downtrodden little erstwhile filling station in western Virginia, then I wouldn’t have gotten one of the most cherished books in my collection. If you look hard enough, and search with enough energy, books seem to come alive in ways different from the metaphorical life we know they possess: they seem to come to you as much as you come to them, pretty much as you witness fence posts, telephone poles and advertising signs approaching as you ride in a passenger car. (BITH, p12)

Assessing a Book’s  Value

But  what good is a chance encounter with a book if that book has no value?  Some books affect and edify us more. But how does one determine value?

First, there is the idea of scarcity (which can easily be manipulated).  In “The Abasement of the Northmores” by Henry James, a widow named Mrs. Hope  publishes all her dead husband’s intimate letters into a single volume and prints exactly one copy (which she hopes will be printed in another edition for the rest of the world to read). About this imaginary book, Matthews asks:

Is poor Mrs. Hope’s single-copy first edition a rare book? One might think so, for it was indeed the only extant copy. The point of the story, however, requires that we understand that it not a rare book, it was merely scarce. To be rare, it would have to be valued by more than the author’s pathetic window. It would, in fact, have to be somewhat generally conceded to be worth having. It would have to be desired at the level of affluence (what if a single copy of an unknown book by James himself were discovered!); it would have to be sought after, as well as scarce, to be properly classified as rare.  (CRBFPAP, p 28)

Next, there is the value of “first editions” which are not only rare but bring the reader back to the original context in which the book was produced. Matthews writes:

… (T)he style of Trollope’s time, as well as that of the man himself, is expressed in the physical book — the paper, the binding, the illustrations, the type. The first edition possesses its own signature; it is the book as Trollope first knew it, and it thus possesses a validity that later editions — even skillfully produced facsimiles, and even those that followed almost immediately — do not possess symbolically …

…The collector of first editions is therefore concerned with the genuine and natural state, in both these old-fashioned conceptions, of the books he honors and desires to own.  This is one aspect of the reality he desires. (CRBFPAP, p 22-3)

A book can acquire accidental value by virtue of its historical context or the reality it reveals. I will discuss  this kind of valuing  in more depth in a later essay.

But what about the opinion of literary critics and generations of readers? Don’t they count for a work’s valuation also?  Of course they can and do, but these estimations are actually taken into account into the overall perception of price and value. Remember – Matthews says — “price is a metaphor” (CRBFPAP, p 26).  It is foolish to regard the current price (or any price) of a book as an objective statement of the book’s value; instead it merely reflects the market value given to something during  a certain snapshot of time.  Only time will tell if this relative value will rise or fall; does anyone  care to speculate?

Lingering questions for ebook lovers

To the contemporary ebook enthusiast, talking about rare books seems both quaint and ridiculous. After all, books can be published on the fly and in abundance; digital copies and piracy ensure that people are never lacking in reading material. One week, the whole world is talking about the new Harry Potter book or the latest Sarah Palin memoir; the next week, these kinds of books are everywhere: at supermarkets, airports and yes even on file-sharing sites.

Jack Matthews has written widely about the literary marketplace of previous centuries;  but how much really has really changed? Aren’t  the  fundamental questions the same?  How do I find good  things to read? How do I reach a wider audience?  How do I avoid reading too much crap?  How do I create the ideal reading experience?   What’s the best way to preserve or memorialize works which have given me pleasure or understanding? How can I ensure that my original investment in time or money will bring an adequate return?

Here are some random things to reflect upon:

• Can digital objects by themselves have value as a collectible? Or must they be wedded to physical devices  to attain the status of collectibility?   (Note the irony here: it is customary for  ebook enthusiasts to complain about digital rights management (DRM) that tie ownership of a digital work to a specific device even though it might increase the ebook device’s collectibility).
• Will the availability  of ebooks (and especially ebooks of public domain works) significantly reduce the economic value of  rare print books?
• The Internet brings abundant information and  expert knowledge to even the most casual collector. How will that change the way they collect and the kinds of books they collect?
• If  ebook licenses generally forbid transfer of ownership,  how will that affect the distribution of literary works over time? If there is no aftermarket for ebooks, how does that affect the  ability of an older work  to re-circulate throughout the community of readers?
• What is the relationship between  profit-oriented  curators of books (book collectors)  and  noncommercial  curators (librarians, academics)? If the aftermarket for ebooks is suppressed by restrictive licenses, will  noncommercial curators be sufficiently adventurous to unearth and preserve hidden treasures?
• In one essay, Matthews expresses amazement at stumbling upon a 19th century book Ribs & Trunks (whose first chapter on whaling  anticipates Moby Dick by 9 years  and  uses a bombastic style uncannily similar to Melville’s).  Here is the Google Books link for Ribs and Trunks.  There. I have just saved you the  hours or days Jack Matthews spent  tracking down and investigating this book.  Does having instant access to this text automatically make it easier or harder  for the contemporary reader to  derive value and pleasure from it?  How psychologically necessary is the  journey to the book?
• How engaged should the writer/storyteller be to how  the current market values his work? Aside from writing  a good or useful narrative and packaging it attractively, is the author  powerless  to manipulate  its  market value?
• If an artistic  work is given away for free, how does that affect the value of the work itself (both in economic and philosophic terms)?  Leaving aside the cost of producing “free works,” does the market assign an economic value even to free works? Is it possible for a great literary work never to have an economic value for  readers and distributors?
• Ebooks mean that bibliophiles no longer need to drive from city to city in the hopes of acquiring  a rare classic at a book shop or library sale. That brings obvious  ecological benefits. But when you minimize  or eliminate the need for this meatspace  journey, how can the literary prospector scavenge with the same amount  of zeal? Are there ways to stumble upon content which  had been already  overlooked by thousands (if not millions) of other prospectors?
• If it is no longer necessary to travel to different places  to find books – to wake up early to be the first in line at that library or estate sale –  how will that change the things we collect? What kinds of things will be overlooked? What kind of information or “metadata” will we miss?

Part 3  of this essay will look at how Jack Matthews’ penchant for book collecting translates into a new kind of literary analysis (to appear next week).

Can you talk about authors who have influenced you during various stages of your life? What was the first literary work that really made an impression on you?

I remember having Joseph Conrad’s late novel, THE ROVER, assigned in a high school English class, but reading it anyway, & while reading it, pausing on a page to contemplate how wonderful it must be to create such realities. (When I mentioned that in a biographical essay, my editor got back to me about the word "anyway" saying that sounded like I wouldn’t normally have read it. I told her that was correct — for I was a relaxed under-achiever as a student). Earlier influences? No particular author, with perhaps the exception of Kenneth Roberts, whose historical novels I greatly enjoyed when I was a pup.  Later, however, I was greatly moved/influenced by reading the novels of Balzac. Then, of course, Mark Twain (I have a pretty good Twain collection of 1st editions, ephemera, etc.). Still more recently, I’ve loved the Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novels (I’ve included "A Sheep In Wolfe’s Clothing" in one of my books on bibliophily; and of the 20 or 25 books I’ve re-read, a half dozen are Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries). Most recently, I’ve gotten to collecting the 1st editions of Christopher Morley — a wonderful writer , woefully neglected by English Departments. I published an essay on his writing in the ANTIOCH REVIEW a year or so back, and just recently got a letter from a "kinsprit" (CM’s neologism) in the Czech Republic, sharing his own enthusiasm for CM (he’s not a native of the Czech Republic, but an American living there). Another recent book I’ve liked & admired: William Gaddis’s novel A FROLIC OF HIS OWN, a wonderful legal satire. And just now, I’m reading my 2nd Lee Child suspense novel — great fun for the 12-year-old that lives on in every man, if he’s not impoverished in pizzazz.

 Can you please mention titles?

Titles I remember with special fondness: Balzac: PERE GORIOT, EUGENIE GRANDET. Old Goriot was a wonderfully obsessed character in  his love for his daughter. I tell my students that the most interesting characters are the most interested, and the extremity of being interested is obsession. EUGENIE GRANDET was also obsessed — with money — and he has one of the great melodramatic scenes in all lit, when he’s dying and a priest leans over him to administer the last rites and Grandet grabs at the priest’s golden cross swinging above him. Mark Twain? LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI  is my favorite. Also some of his short stuff, his obiter dicta and his generally flamboyant personality and his great wit & sensitivity behind all the clowning. Christopher Morley? His richly autobiographical novel, JOHN MISTLETOE, and his splendid novel, KITTY FOYLE (Ginger Rogers won an Academy Award for playing the part, but the movie doesn’t come near the novel.) Also, his many books of essays — they’re all wonderful. And THE SEACOAST  OF BOHEMIA, about his helping found and run a theatre in Hoboken, may be the happiest book I’ve ever read. Rex Stout? How about THE DOORBELL RANG for a start?

 How did the Great Depression affect your early life? Can you think of ways it has influenced your themes or artistic perspective? Do you think writers of personal genres like poetry and fiction change their focus to social and economic issues during times of economic crises?

I had a wonderful childhood and didn’t know there was a Depression. My father was an attorney, born on a farm in Gallia County, Ohio, who studied law under a country judge, passed the bar and eventually had his own law firm in Columbus. I can remember WW1 vets selling apples on the street, but for some reason this didn’t register with me as hardship. I suspect I’m a bit deprived of the social conscience required of liberals, which is why I’m a Teddy Roosevelt Republican (unfortunately, he’s dead). Actually, I’m pretty much of an independent, thinking that the chief error of Republicans is the assumption that people are grownup, rational and honest; on the other hand, the chief intellectual sin of the Democrats is their assumption that people don’t have to be any of those things.

Life in the zoo — which brings up Mencken’s statement that democracy is letting the monkeys run the zoo, which isn’t too far off target. As for the Depression and its fiction and movies: I think people were both more innocent then and more mature. How can that be? I’m not sure, but I suspect I could come up with reasons if I had to.

Your biographical information shows that you’ve taught for several decades. Before that, you served in the Coast Guard for two years and worked at the Post Office for nine years. Can you talk about that time period and how it relates to your later career? What sort of people and things were you coming in contact with?

 I remember reading Jack London’s THE SEA WOLF when I was a radioman on the Coast Guard Cutter Maclaine in the North Pacific, on anti-submarine patrol out of Sitka & Juneau. It was wonderful, for this was the very sea that Wolf Larsen sailed in. When I graduated from OSU in 1949, I worked at a variety of jobs: door-to-door salesman, produce warehouseman, even a part-time private detective for a few cases. Then, married & with 2 young daughters, I got a job in the Parcel Post station in Columbus, Ohio, where I worked for 9 years. Most of my fellow workers were black men, which made me a bit uncomfortable at the time (yes, I had some share in the racism of the day), but eventually I learned to like & respect them, & now, with the great social change we’ve gone through (a testament to our health as a society), I’m grateful for getting to know those guys. I only wish the blacks who are celebrated today–hot-dog athletes, rap "artists" (Rembrandt & Beethoven were artists, not those loud dolts!)) & the so-called black "leaders"–I only wish they had the better qualities I found in those black men I worked with all those years ago; those guys deserved better.

What was your family life like in the 1930s and 40s?

As I mentioned, I had a wonderful childhood. I was indulged far more than most children were. Our solid middle-class neighborhood in Clintonville (Columbus, Ohio, ) was a perfect place for a young boy growing up. (Our family also took wonderful fishing trips to Michigan, Canada, Minnesota; and my dad took me deer hunting to Michigan in 1939, then to Pennsylvania and Maine in the next 2 years). I only wish I’d known then how privileged my life was and could have manifest it to my parents and older sister (my only sibling, who died in 1975 at the age of sixty). But I guess we all have guilt — to be deprived of it is to be deprived of what it is to be human. As I tell my students, if you don’t have a guilty conscience, you don’t have a conscience at all. And why would I teach this to students in my English classes? The answer is yes.

 The filmmaker George Lucas once said that he intended his 1972 film American Graffiti to be a kind of anthropological study of a California teenage fad of "cruising" in their cars to meet girls. The film was a way to document and preserve an aspect of California culture that no longer exists. Can you point to any of your works which — apart from literary merit — document aspects of American society and culture which may no longer exist?

Many of my novels and stories celebrate the time of their creation. Time and geography are always part of what we are. My novels, HANGER STOUT, AWAKE!, BEYOND THE BRIDGE, and THE CHARISMA CAMPAIGNS are a sort of trilogy, all having been inspired by an old-maid high school English teacher I invented, Miss Temple, who said that everyone should keep a diary or journal, for in sitting down to write about something, one creates the thing itself — presents it as well as represents it. (This is, of course, a writerly thought — but as true as a pipe wrench.) Anyway, these 3 novels are all very much part of the 1950s to 1970s — a time when Hanger, for example, could work at a full-time job pumping gas at a small-town Ohio/Sohio station. Such a job makes no sense today, & tomorrow it will be even more anachronistic.

When did you decide you wanted to be an author?

An interesting question, indeed; but unanswerable. Like, when did I become an old man?

Coming Next: Jack Matthews Interview Part 3: Book Collecting.

My introduction to short story writer Jack Matthews could not be more accidental. Between 2007 and 2008, I had been downloading and listening to a series of author interviews conducted by Don Swaim during the 1970s and 80s. Don Swaim did a series of 3 minute interviews with CBS Radio Services called Book Beat, presumably when authors showed up in NYC for a book tour.  Swaim shot the breeze with authors for an hour, talking about random things, and later found enough material for the three minute segment that actually aired.  But he saved the audio from the full interviews, digitalized them and put them online.

The Wired for Books  interviews themselves are unpredictable, unrehearsed, meandering, sometimes dull and sometimes overly focused on topical irrelevancies (See Note below). Unlike the erudite interviews of  the KCRW Bookworm podcast, (which Michael Silverblatt conducts like a graduate student eager to show off his profound understanding of an  author’s oeuvre),  the exigencies of a radio schedule gave Swaim little time to do real preparation.  Over the decades  Swaim interviewed a number of literary greats (both recognized and unrecognized). At the same time, he interviewed a lot of popular authors, biographers, historians  and celebrities who had no business writing books.

Sometime in 2008, I was listening to a random mp3 while doing housework.  It was a fascinating interview with a man who collected rare books and had recently published a book about book collecting. Midway through the interview, I realized I had already heard the same interview while driving from San Antonio to Houston. I remember making  a mental note to look the author up, but never did.

His name was Jack Matthews, and the interview was done  in 1984. (Listen to the mp3). When I googled around, I discovered some amazing things:

• Not only was Jack Matthews still alive, he was  teaching classes part-time at Ohio University at the age of 84.
• Almost all of his 20+ books are available as used books on Amazon.com and half.com. If you don’t include shipping costs,  about 2/3 of them are available for less than $1.
• Despite the fact that books by Matthews have received good reviews  from New York Times, Time Magazine, LA Times, London Review of Books and Washington Post and blurbs from Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess and James Dickey,  not one of his books has ever received a comment on Amazon.com – not one!
• The  Wikipedia page for Jack Matthews still goes to a biography of   the Welsh rugby player.

When asked in the 1984 interview whether he saw talent in his writing students, Matthews talked about a professor of his  once told him that  in his own way Matthews was “probably one of the worst writers in the class”:

Of course it’s hard to insult somebody who has the ego to be a writer. I simply drew a line around the phrase “in my own way” and cherished that  if I was going to be bad, at least I was being  uniquely bad. It is hard to determine — to judge –  who might or might not be successful. Certainly there are very few students who have the neural muscularity — (to use an utterly impossible metaphor) — who have the strength of nerve to become a writer. It’s a cruel undertaking — the assaults upon the ego are notorious, and that’s why  a lot of writers  become celebrities and celebrities generally tend to  be fear biters; but occasionally you will find a student who has a natural gift..

In 2009 I read a large number of his books and interviewed Matthews by email.  For the next week or so Teleread will run the complete interview broken into three  parts along with an excerpt from his unpublished WORKER’s WRITEBOOK  (a how-to book for student writers). I’ll also be making some posts about the works of Jack Matthews and why I feel he is important to the 21st century reader.  In addition to his fiction, Jack Matthews has published reflections about the nature of book collecting and the role of libraries in our culture.

Stanley Lindberg wrote:

Engaging wit and irony have been characteristic of Matthews’s writing from the start, and both are strongly present in his latest gatherings of stories. His irony is increasingly darker, however, and his characters’ obsession with memory and its distortions plays a more dominant role in this later work, much of which deals with death. For the most part, these are stories with deceptively simple and ordinary surfaces, but they are driven by powerful and ominous undercurrents, which often fuse the local and regional with the archetypal. Few can do it better. Without question, Matthews has established himself as one of America’s finest storytellers.

Reading Jack Matthews: Where to Start

Let me outline his literary output   and suggest where to start reading.

In the 1960s  he published a poetry book and a short story collection, then HANGER STOUT AWAKE, an easygoing  novel about a high school boy with a peculiar talent.   In the seventies he published several other novels, including my personal favorite TALE OF ASA BEAN (the story of a cerebral geek obsessed with both sex and writing ludicrous art manifestos).  His book THE CHARISMA CAMPAIGNS (a dialogue-driven  tale of a used car salesman in a small town) was nominated for a National Book Award. In the 1980s after publishing the novel SASSAFRAS (about a phrenologist giving shows on the 19th century American Frontier), Jack Matthews published several story collections with Johns Hopkins U. Press (CRAZY WOMEN, DIRTY TRICKS, DUBIOUS PERSUASIONS, GHOSTLY POPULATIONS and STORYHOOD AS WE KNOW IT). He also started publishing essay collections about the philosophical aspects of book collecting, starting with BOOKING IN THE HEARTLAND.  Since the 1990s, he has continued  publishing collections of stories and essays  every few years. These are more of the same (and  wonderful). In the current century he has returned to shorter literary forms and poetry. SCHOPENHAUER’S WILL was published in Czech translation overseas a few years ago, but has still not found a publisher in the US.  His most recent collection ABRUPTIONS (“short stories which end abruptly”) is still looking for a publisher, while his next novel GAMBLER’s NEPHEW will be published in 2011.

Start  by reading any of his short story collections from the 1980s or 1990s.  They are inventive and philosophical but generally easy-to-read    (my personal preference is CRAZY WOMEN – where every story contains at least one crazy woman!)  Also, let me recommend TALES OF THE OHIO LAND, a series of original historical tales that seem to read more like American folklore than short stories. Full of incident and bits of history, I think any middle school student would be able to  get into TALES (which is adorned with lovely drawings from Matthews’ own  daughter). Most high school students could get into  HANGER STOUT AWAKE  and identify with the narrator (although  some of the references might   seem  dated).

For essay collections, I’d start with BOOKING IN THE HEARTLAND which consists  of philosophical digressions about book collecting. This  book is positively Emersonian  – especially in the first essay called “Wasting Time.” It is also funny and thought-provoking; one of my alltime faves!  The later volumes of  essay collections (MEMOIRS OF A BOOKMAN, READING MATTER: A RABID BIBLIOPHILE’S ADVENTURES AMONG OLD AND RARE BOOKS and BOOKING PLEASURES follow the same basic formula as BOOKING and are just as interesting.  (His 1977 work COLLECTING RARE BOOKS FOR PLEASURE AND PROFIT is interesting but a little dated).

I haven’t read any of Matthews’ fiction books  from the current century (none of them have been published yet on American soil!), but they sound more aphoristic and experimental, more concerned with form and genre and less concerned with entertaining people around a campfire. If you want to get a sense of what the 21st century Jack Matthews  is like, you could read several flash stories he published in Agni Review under the pseudonym Matt Hughes.  For me they read more like philosophical fables than flesh-and-blood stories, but they are still fun.

As I mentioned, the 25 minute  1984 Wired for Books interview is good.  It is available in both mp3 and streamed Real Audio files. If you can deal with Real Media streaming, you can hear Jack Matthews read  his mysterious/supernatural story Girl at the Window (which strikes me as interesting in a Turn-of-the-Screw  way). Also,  marginally relevant (but still fascinating) is a 46 minute dialogue between Don Swaim and Jack Matthews about Ambrose Bierce. (A little backstory: Don Swaim is a Bierce fanatic, as his personal website will show and Bierce hails from Ohio – as do Swaim and Matthews).

Finally, for those who stubbornly refuse to read anything  not readable on an ebook reader,  I am happy to report that  my city library subscribes to JSTOR , a scholarly journal archive that  lets patrons  download full-text articles as PDFs from selected  literary magazines (such as Antioch Review and North American Review). In less than 5 minutes I had downloaded 30+ PDFs out of the 200+ JSTOR search results.  In fact, Jack Matthews has published widely in literary journals (and most of these things later turn up in  books); they  just can’t be found by googling.  (If you’re using JSTOR, try looking for  the excellent “The Library: Whose Apple” essay from the Antioch Review).   Most libraries probably have  similar subscriptions available for patrons.

Neglected Writers: Why Don’t They Just Get on Twitter?

Those  in  publishing know there is nothing particularly unusual  about an author being underappreciated or unrecognized.  His books going out of print…..yawn!  Should we continue to act surprised when  celebrity “authors”  are invited  on talk show to promote their “books”  while at the same time career writers have problems getting published (much less reviewed). Join the club, most    would  say.

Even if we accept  these things as part of the  cold hard reality of publishing, the case of Jack Matthews still seems unusual.  Naturally I don’t expect everyone to share  my superlative assessment of his oeuvre. But I expect bookish people at least to have heard of him.   Even my bookish friends who go out of their way to read  the latest novel from Africa or the experimental novella from  50 years ago draw a blank at the mention of the name.   Matthews has been publishing reliably in college literary journals; two university presses (JHU and Ohio U) have published his books (in addition to Putnam, Harcourt  and Scribner’s).  Oddly, Johns Hopkins Press was publishing his works at the same time I was getting my master’s from  their creative writing program. Yet I never heard  anything about Matthews (and neither did  other JHU classmates).  It was only blind luck that I stumbled upon the audio interview 20 years later.

Sure, writing is its own reward, and  Matthews has had a successful career by many measures; surely he is  well-known by literati inside his home state of  Ohio. But what is Ohio anyway? With a population of a mere  11.5 million –  surely no well-known author has ever managed to  come out of that literary backwater (more).

The reasons  84 year old Jack Matthews still has not received a single review on Amazon.com are obvious. He has not opened a Twitter account, started a Facebook fan  page, launched  a blog, put up a promotional video on Youtube or adopted the  the latest technological/promotional fad-of-the-week.  Out of all the literary shortcomings a storyteller can have, technological idiocy is by far the most unforgivable.

Only a fraction of deserving authors are ever noticed by prize committees or the generous eyes of Oprah  or  the New Yorker. What should older & obscure midlist authors do in the meantime? Even literary bloggers (who go out of their way to seek out quality writing) seem to be more focused on winnowing through  the best offerings from Amazon vine than uncovering neglected writers.  That is understandable; given  that the number of books  published annually has doubled between 2003 and 2008, one can hardly  blame them for preferring not to linger in  the hazy  past  of the  1980s.

As I said, I don’t expect readers of this essay to agree with my literary assessment; you should make up your own minds by reading Matthews yourself.    But Matthews is not a hard writer; occasionally he experiments with technique and at times his style can be sophisticated (but never abstruse);  sure,   his  latest (unpublished)  fiction seems esoteric and cerebral,  but most of his fiction is accessible and  easy-to-read; it portrays ordinary life with sincerity, compassion  and humor. Surely a book club that reads Roberto Bolaño or Jhumpa Lahiri would have little problem understanding or appreciating Jack Matthews.

It is commonplace to lament the decline of literary standards or the decline of reading overall. That is not the problem. We just have more of everything: more crap, more genius and more stuff in between. On the flip side, that leaves us less time to go exploring different authors, less time to take a chance on   unknown qualities. Already we have 108 years worth of Nobel Prize winning authors to catch up with;  we could probably spend our entire adult years just reading works by Nobel Prize winners and have time for nothing else.

This literary abundance is something   to be thankful for. At the same time it virtually guarantees that many great writers will remain invisible to readers and    critics.  I mention the fact that Jack Matthews has received no Amazon.com reviews as an unfortunate consequence of obscurity.  But not receiving  a single customer review  is  a common occurrence for ebooks and self-published books. How many times have you bought  a book online simply on the basis of glowing reviews on Amazon.com or changed your mind when you realized there were none ? A while back I forwarded to Mr. Matthews a scabrous (and totally unfair) review of one of his books from an online site.   Both of us laughed it off.  At the same time,  we were amazed and almost  gratified that someone had taken the time  to read and hate a book so vigorously. It was almost reassuring.

In his book-collecting journeys, Matthews acknowledged the rare circumstances of discovering a book:

A book is, after all, part of  a message: it is the transmitting part of that does not become a full message until it is received or read. Consider a used-book store, with shelves crowded to groaning under their thousands of books; then consider how many of these books are being read now, or have been read within the past year, or even the past decade, by anyone.

In short, it can be an adventure and an excitement to read from an old, forgotten book and thus receive a message no one else today is taking in, or no one else remembers clearly. It is an act of liberation, of freedom, to pick up a volume on impulse, give it a few minutes and listen to the message it is sending out. No doubt most of the books you pick up will prove worthless to you at that time; still you have given them another chance, and you haven’t really wasted your time. (Collecting Rare Books for Pleasure & Profit, p 24).

From the author’s point of view, the public’s neglect of his works can be dispiriting. But from the reader’s point of view, this neglect   provide a delicious opportunity to discover a new and unfamiliar wine … and then to share it with everybody.

August 29, 2010 Update. I am writing a collection of essays about the liteary works of Jack Matthews. For this project I have created a new website www.ghostlypopulations.com that will provide news & updates about Jack Matthews as well as my progress writing that book.

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Notes:

More about the Wired for Books interviews. Yes, I have listened to all 250+ of the WFB interviews. They run the gamut, and about 30% could be classified as “celebrity interviews” but most are entertaining and insightful. Part of the charm of these interviews comes from the fact that the author guests never expected that the full audio would ever be archived somewhere. They thought they were recording only a  3 minute interview.  Interviews I recommend: Ray Bradbury (what a raconteur), Barry Hannah,  Thomas Keneally,  Jane Smiley (total egghead), John Barth (IBID),  James Dickey (highly entertaining and insightful), James Michener (not a fan of his fiction, but his anecdotes here were great) Jerzy Kosinski (he sounded like a loon and he was defensive about a minor literary scandal, but still an amazing interview), Harold Brodkey, Henry Louis Gates (talks about unearthing early African-American novel Our Nig)   William Shirer (talked about  WW2 reporting), John Gardner (sounds  more modest and open-minded than I expected),  Walter Tevis, P.D. James (never expected to enjoy this as much as I did), Doris Lessing, Han Suyin (great interview! brilliant and fascinating Asian woman!)  Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers!), Karl Shapiro, and Raymond Carver (the two interviews  were interesting though not particularly riveting;  the interview with his wife Tess Gallagher is a lot more revealing).