Category Archives: English

UPDATE II: Publishing Books In The Age Of The Internet, Pathological PC and Unprecedented laziness (Hire Your Own PR)

Education, English, General, Ilana Mercer, Internet, Journalism, Literature, Political Economy

The welcome news comes that Karen De Coster is publishing a book.

A mutual friend, author Rob Stove, has offered Karen some advice and posted it on her heavily trafficked Facebook Wall.

I counseled differently:

“As someone who has done every bit of heavy lifting for my last book—quite successfully, I might add—I have to disagree somewhat with Rob (who advises writing for prestigious publications on the topic, first).

The traditional, stuffy, staid publishing world is dying (yippee). I read the once-brave TLS. All new writers have to be (it would appear) people of color and/or those with no Y chromosome. The only writing worth reading vis-a-vis these new writers is the superb writing by the TLS’s increasingly PC reviewers (who try to be kind to the pig-ignorant, boring, PC writers they have to review).

In any case, you sell books from a platform. Mine was developed over almost 15 years as a weekly columnist.

Karen De Coster writes for a very large site, LRC, with a dedicated, niche readership. She manages social media with skill and has thousands of FB friends (whom she will have to instruct to “Like” her book and display it on their FB pages, if they want to keep her FB company. Here is my Facebook Friendship Policy).

That’s the future of publishing. Who cares if some pompous scribe in a dying publication (check its Alexa rank for stage of rigor) gives one a good review? Rob Stove—he edited The Cannibal; hire a good editor. We all need one—was mentioned by the New Yorker, and other prestigious publications. To this not all of us can aspire. However, were Rob to write a book about politics or culture, he would have to forget about future mention.

Back to my point: Karen can sell lots of books if she publishes the book herself (How much would you rather earn? 17%-50% royalties or 100%, all the more so when you, the writer, do all the work). She can go the CreateSpace route or with her own label. She then uses her platform on LRC to sell to an already interested audience. She also promotes her book on Facebook, via ads and by requiring all friends to “Like” and display book on their Fav. page. Even big names are publishing their own books (see David Frum’s new book. I followed it from CNN).

A small publisher does nothing for a writer except deplete him/her. There are a handful of large publishers worth considering for the TV PR they can generate. This writer (me) manages every aspect of the project—social media, fan page and website designs (I pay the attendant bills too, so…), Amazon page management, all writing, limited PR, etc. That’s the route to getting books read by the public in the age of the Internet (without which the true rebels would be destined for obscurity). Books published by smaller, if respectable, publishers are like the proverbial tree felled in a faraway wood. Almost no one reads them. (Check their profile on Amazon. You’ll see.)

For example, “The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism” is written by a man with the “right” kind of name (non-English/non-Western): Hamid Dabashi. It was published on June 5, 2012 by Zed Books, a print that met the Times Literary Review’s standards.

It’s Amazon rank: #1,614,336 in Books. If you are new to book marketing, that’s abysmal.

(Btw, if you don’t market on Amazon, you’re retarded.)

On the bright side, by the number of reviews “The Arab Spring” got, we can tell that at least one person has read what Dabashi has to say. Conversely, and pessimistically, “0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.” In other words, so far, nobody gives a tinker’s toss what Dabashi’s single reviewer had to say about Dabashi’s latest work.

UPDATE I (10/30): Here’s another TLS “winner,” published (November 1, 2011) by Encounter (who refused the well-motivated proposal that became The Cannibal).

In Money In A Free Society, Tom Congdon touts every form of macroeconomic statism. His approving TLS reviewer mentions the “Austerians” (very bad) but says nothing about the Austrians.

Amazon ranks Money In A Free Society at #560,109 in Books. Zero reviews. Who pays these people?

UPDATE II (Nov. 3): HIRE YOUR OWN PR.

Unless you can get a book deal with one of the major big publishers (try), publish yourself. You’ll be smacking yourself if you don’t. To repeat: 15% royalties (standard industry fare) vs. 100%? Case closed. All the more so since small publishers do nothing for you. Unless your publisher is prepared to invest a few thousand for a few weeks of TV and media blitz. However, you could buy such PR yourself privately. Why hand over your money to a 2nd party to hire a 3rd? If you control the purse strings (as disposable income dictates), hire PR directly, to get on the main shows.

Want to have a frothy a day? Go with a small publisher. They suck. These are dominated by errant youth (or hippie elders who defer to such youth), who don’t have a work ethic or a brain cell to rub between them. No one has taught America’s young how to work professionally; how to conduct themselves with respect to author and contract and execute duties properly: If you want them done to standards, you’ll be inputting info and updating your Amazon page and other Internet displays of your product.

Individuals such as Karen are coming from an accounting career. They work alongside people who have serious degrees. The writing profession, on the other hand, is dominated by individuals who are repositories for postmodern education and values (even when they are libertarian). Don’t go there, unless it’s with a powerful, large publisher.

Katherine Fenton’s Typical Whining Womanhood

Aesthetics, Economy, Elections, English, Feminism, Gender, Labor, Republicans

Ridiculous is the imprecision with which conservatives have lashed out at the repulsive Katherine Fenton. She is the “young woman” who questioned the president and his rival, during the second presidential debate, about a non-existent construct: Pay “inequalities in the workplace.” “Specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn.”

Attack her as the specimen of whining womanhood she is, will you? Don’t call her vague names (“”Feminazi,” “Tool”).

Also, go for the execution: Without exception, the clones that keep stepping into the limelight stud their conversation with the same mind-numbing commonplaces and humbugs, delivered in grating, staccato, tart tones of speech and a truncated vocabulary.

“I feel like” is how these women—endearingly called “young women”—preface every utterance; for they feel a lot, but don’t think much.

Yuk.

Is any conservative going to point out how off-putting America’s “young women” sound, irrespective of how pretty they look?

No, because The Thing I’ve described fits most young conservative commentators too. Remember how Laura Ingraham was forced to grovel for lampooning the dense Meghan McCain’s unmistakable moronity and Valley-Girl inflection?

In any event, implicit in Fenton’s question is that the wage discrepancy reported speaks to a widely accepted conspiracy to suppress women’s wages; and that the length of time a woman has been in the work force, her age, experience, education; whether she has put her career on hold to marry and mother—do not factor into the wage equation.

Incapable as these women are of analytical thinking, they cannot comprehend how certain realities factor into the wage equation. To wit, women are more likely than men to have had an interrupted career trajectory and to opt for part-time and lower-paying professions—education instead of engineering, for example.

If your average Republican galvanized economic logic to dispel distaff America’s claims of disadvantage, this is what he’d have said:

“If women with the same skills as men were getting only 72 cents for every dollar a man earns, men as a group would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that entrepreneurs don’t ditch men for women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.” (From “Guys Do Double Duty For Feminist Delusions.”)

Enoch Powell At 100

America, Britain, English, IMMIGRATION, Literature, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Race

Enoch Powell’s famous, much-maligned “rivers of blood” speech has devolved over the years to suit Powell’s adversaries. Delivered in Birmingham, in April 1968, notes The Times Literary Supplement, the famous segment read as follows:

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. . . . To see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”

The TLS’s welcome, if marginal, mention of Powell is on the occasion of the publication of Tom Bower’s “balanced critique of Powell’s rhetoric”: Enoch at 100: A revaluation of the life, politics and philosophy.

Helped along by oodles of ignorance, the “foaming Tiber mutated over the years to ‘rivers of blood’, notionally streaming through British cities as the tide of immigration rose unchecked.” (TLS)

As Bower points out, “the official figure for immigrants at the time was relatively small”:

“only 7,000 males every year”, but “the government did not announce that annually a further 50,000 dependants of established immigrants were also entering Britain”.
Powell’s fear was less of immigrants as such (though his “Rivers of Blood” speech contains passages about “negroes” which might land him in [a British] court today) than of a breakdown in “social cohesion”.

“Repeatedly,” it is observed in this TLS editorial, Powell “pointed to rioting in American cities, then at a fearful pitch. Why was Britain inviting the ‘tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence’ of the country?”

Stupidly, the TLS editor joins in blaming Powell’s “oratory” for making “immigration a taboo subject by silencing even reasoned opponents of immigration and multiculturalism who feared being tarnished as racists.”

From the fact that “plain talk about the topic is rare, even dangerous,” the TLS concludes that Powell is at fault.

Oh my!

I do like what Saul Bellow said about the “intractable phenomenon” in the US: “we lack a language in which to talk about it.”

IT being unfettered immigration, also known as “The Suicide of the West.”

Still, I’m pleasantly surprised that the TLS (July 6, 2012) made even marginal mention of Enoch at 100. Surprised because the TLS, once so objective and rigorous, is tilting to tinny, lefty, obscurantist postmodernism. (To modify a Joan Rivers witticism, Why would you want to reproduce a rash?)

That’s one way to reduce circulation, and suck the joy out of English literature (“the English-speaking people” is a concept TLS reviewers now routinely mock or “deconstruct”).

We Know “What Kind of ‘Skeeza’ is a Condoleeza [sic]”

Bush, English, History, Iraq, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism

“Skeeza” was the moniker that Brother Amiri Baraka attached to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose VP candidacy many conservatives are pushing.

Via RT:

The latest reports out of the Republican Party’s inner circle suggest that Rice, the Secretary of State under former President George W. Bush, is a viable option for Mr. Romney as he comes close to selecting a vice presidential candidate. Drudge Report, the heated political website overseen by conservative pundit Matt Drudge, alleged that Rice was among Romney’s top picks in a posting made this Thursday.

Just this once, I must agree with New Jersey’s awful, inartful poet laureate.

Let us take a romp down memory lane (via the Mercer Archives) with Ms. Rice:

FROM “HOLD THEIR FEET TO THE FIRE!”, dated May 29, 2002:

Condoleezza Rice [head of the National Security Council] was unblushing as she justified her dismissive treatment of the critical mass of intelligence pertaining to impending terrorist attacks. Her distinction between analytical reports and specific intelligence information was especially specious. …Is Rice claiming that the mental capacity for deduction is not part of her job description? (President Bush might get away with that.) Can’t Americans expect the thousands of agents they employ to possess the rudimental capability for drawing inferences from data and moving to verify or refute information? Can Rice not be expected to execute a simple algorithm, like instruct her subordinates to screen and canvass certain targeted suspects?

…the National Security Council … is an office created by the National Security Act of 1947 to advise the president on “integration of domestic, foreign and military policies relating to national security and to facilitate interagency cooperation.” If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she oversees.

Don’t go away. There is much more to come from the Mercer vault to counter the GOP ditto-heads’ historic Alzheimer’s.

Later.