Monetization, Schmonetization: From Jascha to Jascha

Most of the links on this page will bring me a small commission, and sometimes a royalty to boot, if you take them and end up making a purchase. The exception to the commission principle is any link to iTunes, including the iBookstore: those referrals are freebies, unless you end up buying A Kiss Before You Leave Me itself there. But, instead of sending you where you'd pay full price for my favorite set of recordings by my favorite performer, I'm recommending iTunes (where the price is so much better, at least until they come to their senses: US$9.99 for the equivalent of a 6-CD set) as a purveyor of the Icon collection of the best of Jascha Heifetz on EMI. Yes, it's all in mono, and yes, the average recording here is almost 75 years old. But, if you haven't sampled them, at least do that much. And this may help: a more readable list of the contents of the set, naming (composers') names and such.

[Added 11 August 2011: Full disclosure: I am now a member of the iTunes/iBooks/... affiliates program. New links to iTunes products will reflect this, and some older links will be updated. Otherwise, advertising policies remain unchanged. There are worse things than a little monetization.]

'Time Value' versus 'Tristram Shandy'

Most of the time the Jascha who writes Jascha Writes is content to remind you less of his alter ego, the more tightly wound (or tightly winding) James Hulbert who wrote A Kiss Before You Leave Me, than of Tristram Shandy, who in Laurence Sterne's masterpiece (1759ff.) sets out to tell the story of his life, gets caught up in anticipation of his own conception and (for hundreds of pages) may or may not get around to being born: the character as (pure) narrator, almost, and surely the poster child for dilatory discourse. Sound familiar? If you started delaying your next coffee break when I promised you a friend's recipe for skinny cappuccino last month, you're well and truly weaned now; and if you started wondering a couple of days later why I cited Marguerite Duras' North China Lover rather than her earlier (and far better-known) book The Lover, well, you're still wondering. But that's all right. All in good time. Most of the time. But if I don't post something today about Nick Spalding's Life… With No Breaks, you risk missing out on big savings on it at Amazon.com, where it usually costs $2.99 but until the end of October is reduced to 89 cents, which is a steal even for a Kindle book. Nick Spalding is a high-profile UK indie humor author and blogger; Life… With No Breaks is currently the number 4 humor bestseller on the Amazon.co.uk Kindle list and deserves more readers internationally. (It even contains a glossary of UK-specific vocabulary. Readers in the UK, by the way, can get a deal, too: for a few more days, Life… is just 69p at Amazon.co.uk.) Now, is it an accident that I'm talking about Sterne and Spalding practically in the same breath? Not necessarily.

Adrian Hon on Book Piracy

Feeling like something akin to a pirate myself, I'm just going to link you to Adrian Hon's Telegraph blog post on digital piracy of books. My greatest surprise is that it took me a week to discover this post. Some thoughts about the issue have been going through my head, but they had (and have) yet to take final form. Read Adrian Hon (and his readers), and let's all go on thinking about this together.

John le Carré, 'Our Kind of Traitor'

I had the amazing good fortune to read the new John le Carré novel, Our Kind of Traitor, as a relative innocent. (I say 'relative' because those of us old enough to remember the first publication of his breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold [1963] all lost some of our innocence the day we read it.) What I mean is that I was able to approach Our Kind of Traitor without having read or heard anything about its plot. When 'the reader' finds out, fully 20% of the way into the novel (Kindle readers track their progress through a book in percentage points, not pages), what sort of 'operation' Traitor will depict, that was my first knowledge of it; similarly with the question of what particular issues or forms of criminal activity form the thematic backdrop for the novel. I'm determined not to spoil your innocence in these regards, if you're fortunate enough to have it  still intact. I'll reveal nothing more than that I liked the book, like it even more upon reflection--but feel very much that, especially where this book is concerned, liking or not liking can be something of a red herring: in the rush to judge, we can easily trip over our own feet. I do think that every reader will appreciate in Traitor the voice of a master storyteller (and master narrator, which is not quite the same thing: Traitor is an example of le Carré at his most overtly Conradian)--even if we don't have the good fortune of hearing le Carré voicing his own prose--and I strive to give even 'lesser' writers than le Carré the benefit of the doubt in this sense: instead of dismissing a work (or issuing demerits to it) when it doesn't meet ordinary expectations, I try to 'give it its head' (like a horse) and appreciate (as carefully as possible) where it takes me. Readers may not expect espionage novels (if that's what Traitor is) to linger as long as this one does getting out of the gate or (trust me on this) to cross the finish line with such a burst of speed--but we all choose at such moments whether to stop reading or whether to start. There will be readers for whom the greatest interest of Our Kind of Traitor will lie not in its panoply of often surprisingly sympathetic characters or its treatment of 'issues' but in what in it runs counter to commonly held beliefs about narrative. The choice is yours.

In Miranda's Books

One of my major goals for this blog is to make clearer the debts of A Kiss Before You Leave Me to the work of other writers. There are prominent signposts in the novel itself, starting with the epigraphs (from Plato to William S. Burroughs) that precede each numbered 'book' of Kiss, and they're so important to me that I'm tempted, on slow days, to 'serialize' those epigraphs here, usually with no comments, as a sort of look back over my shoulder at the novel as a whole. But today I introduce another category of entries, which I call 'In Miranda's Books.' Miranda is one of the principal characters in Kiss, a sympathetic, beautiful, passionate 'work in progress' whom we first meet as a translator trying to get back on track professionally after a chaotic period of alcoholism, adultery, and divorce. She is by preference a literary translator (French to English), and her education is mostly in the area of European literature. She has her favorite writers, those who have long impassioned her and whom her (now ex-)husband Vince has read over her shoulder, so to speak, for almost 15 years. Today there's time only to mention some of the names--Homer, Cervantes, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Marguerite Duras--and to promise to return to them individually....

For Every nook, 'A Kiss...'

In the last few days, A Kiss Before You Leave Me has turned up on the virtual shelves of most of the remaining US and international ebook shops, most recently for Barnes & Noble's nook. nook is easy on the eyes (that's my first impression, at least), so I'm thinking Miranda and Jack and the rest of the characters in Kiss should feel at home there. Kiss continues of course to be available at Amazon, the Sony Reader Store, Smashbooks... with Kobo just a few days away. Thanks to everyone for their support and their patience.

Thank You, Nick Spalding

I must have been drifting yesterday because I both failed to notice on my own, and missed the email notifying me, that A Kiss Before You Leave Me was featured on UK indie author Nick Spalding's blog Spalding's Racket. I've been following the blog for weeks and want to make sure you know about it: it's both generous to the indies it features and manageable for followers. Until I can set up a conspicuous list here of blogs I follow, this brief post will have to do for starters.

'Kiss'-ing with iBooks, and a Very Special Book Drop

I had the best intentions in the world of blogging by now about Dostoevsky's Eternal Husband and about Marguerite Duras (separately), but... I wish I could say, "but life got in the way," but it was more like "marketing got in the way." So, instead, let me just mention two unrelated items. Yesterday A Kiss Before You Leave Me appeared for the first time in Apple's iBookstore (for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), and I have to say that, Kindle loyalist though I am, I was very close to being... seduced... by the look and feel of my own book in iBooks. I'm sure I'll be wrestling with this for a while....

Second item, and worthy of a new paragraph. I hope to have things to say here, one day, that will be useful to other indie authors. Today, however, I want to touch on how we indies (and indeed all authors and publishers) can do a little something extra for someone else. While reading through materials from Smashwords (about everything from formatting to, yes, marketing), I kept reading about a program that helps authors donate copies of their ebooks to Coalition military personnel deployed overseas and their dependents. There are a number of interrelated websites, but I found the clearest overview at the Smashwords blog. I've just enlisted (in a manner of speaking), and I'll post more links as the project develops. It's called Operation eBook Drop and is the brainchild of indie author Edward C. Patterson, working with the help of Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords. Operation eBook Drop may be the most worthwhile thing you google on any given day....