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I’m an inveterate Dickens fan, so I’m reading Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens right now. The novel’s mystery centers on Dickens’ final unfinished manuscript, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which, like all of his novels, was published in serialization before appearing as a book. Serialization was once deader than Mr. Dickens himself, but the Internet has brought a resurgence of books and stories told in serial form.

A terrific example of this is Dahlia Lithwick’s novel Saving Face, which is appearing, as each chapter gets written, on Slate.com. Lithwick’s novel got off to a roaring start in September, when she had about three weeks to work on it exclusively before her usual reporting beat, the Supreme Court, returned to session. Chapters were appearing several times a week. Since Lithwick returned to her usual reporting duties, she has been putting out about a chapter a week, which is still quite impressive.

Lithwick went a step beyond serializing–she posed questions to her readers to get information and ideas to fill in parts of her plot. On Facebook and Twitter, she had hundreds of fans watching and offering help, answering questions ranging from what was the one job her character Erica could never ask the “manny” to do to research on divorce law in Virginia.

Neil Gaiman and other authors have taken to Twitter to post serialized stories, 140 characters at a time. The Guardian has a short piece on how Gaiman and others, including Melvin Burgess, Ben Okri, R.N. Morris and Philippa Gregory have used Twitter.

Authors like Gaiman are certain to have a publishing market for anything they create on Twitter. It would be interesting to consider how serialization might influence the possibility of future publication for someone like Lithwick. Any thoughts on serialization in the Internet age? Share them in comments.

Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

Fall is a great time of year for books. It’s the run-up to the holiday season, a time when lots of new titles appear and lots of publishing news is made. So here’s a roundup:

The Huffington Post recently began a books section that’s now my new favorite on the web. It has a wide assortment of articles, from readers’ and editors’ picks to the bestseller price wars between Amazon, Walmart and Target, to the top ten anti-heroes, from Pippi Longstocking and Scarlett O’Hara to Tom Ripley and Artemis Fowl. (I’d like to make a personal plug for Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair and Soames Forsyte of The Man of Property, part of the Forsyte Saga.)

I’ve been disappointed with coverage at The Daily Beast, which started out strong and has been scaled back. Articles stay up there for weeks at a time and some of the sections have been eliminated. The video above, an interview with Philip Roth and Tina Brown, is the first author video I’ve seen out there in months now.

I’ve never liked Philip Roth, but he has a new book out, and the always entertaining Tina Brown interviewed him, so I thought I’d see what he had to say about the future of the novel. After this video, I like him even less. Roth, predictably, says that the novel is dead, that it can’t compete with screens. There are more video excerpts from Brown’s interview with Roth at the links above.

The New Yorker’s surprisingly uninteresting Fall books special does have one highlight, Ellis Weiner’s depressing yet hilarious take on the current state of affairs in book marketing. It’s in the form of a letter from the publicity department of Propensity Publishing, and includes this gem:

immediately on Saturday (!) all of editorial (Janet, plus probably Michelle, her assistant) and I go to the Frankfurt Book Fair for a week. During that time the office will be closed, although to help cover the costs of the Germany trip it will actually be sublet to the John Lindsay Elementary School P.T.A. as a rehearsal space for this year’s fund-raiser production of “The Music Man.”

Poets & Writers’ November/December issue just arrived, and it’s got some great stuff, including a profile of Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and her newly released second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, and a piece by Ben Percy on persevering through the rejections during the submission process. He even describes his spreadsheet of first- through fourth-tier magazines and journals and how he use it when sending out short fiction.

I’ve been lucky enough to interview Ben a few times, and he’s a terrific guy in addition to being a talented writer. He’s also got a review of the new Stephen King novel, and a bare-knuckled defense of fiction as entertainment, in the November issue of Esquire.

I’m still mining great information from the panel discussion by small press publishers I attended at the Wisconsin Book Festival. As the discussion got deep into how to find a publisher for your chapbook, policies varied, from accepting unsolicited manuscripts to invitation-only, but all of the publishers the advice quickly turned to a point on which all agreed: if you want a publisher to seriously consider your work, the manuscript has to be perfectly clean. Here are their suggestions, which were made with poets in mind, but which apply to all writing you’re preparing for submission:

Read and Re-read

When you’re working on a manuscript, you will have to read and reread your work. It’s hard to catch your own errors: after all, you know what it’s supposed to say. Let a little time elapse between making revisions and reading the new version. And always edit on paper rather than on screen.

Seek Out Critique

Don’t send out anything that you haven’t showed to at least one other writer whose editing skills you trust. A reader will find things you can’t, from whether a poem delivers on its promise and how well the poems you’ve put together work as a collection to misspellings and bad line breaks. Get feedback on each major revision.

Fresh Eyes

The final step, after assembling, editing, revising and re-editing your collection is to have a fresh set of eyes read it over. Ask someone who hasn’t seen previous drafts of the poems or manuscript. Fresh eyes will find a surprising number of small things to fix in a manuscript you were sure was perfect.

Thanks again to the fantastic panelists and moderators: Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman, co-editors of Verse Wisconsin; Charles Nevsimal of Centennial Press, B.J. Best, editor of Desperado Press (from whom I borrowed the gorgeous image above); F.J. Bergmann of Mobius-The Journal of Social Change; Lester Smith, president of Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and president of Popcorn Press; Ralph Murray of Little Eagle Press, Wisconsin; Linda Aschbrenner of Marsh River Editions and former editor and publisher of Free Verse; and Richard Roe of Fireweed Press.

It all started with the decision to scrub the shower.

Despite having a water softener and using Iron Out religiously, it still gets iron stains. So I donned my Nyplex gloves and started in with the cleanser.

Then my hand, and the tile it was scrubbing, went through the wall.

The rest of the saga isn’t important (though it includes several trips to big-box home improvement stores, a new faucet, trying to match 45-year-old tiles, and I could whine about it for hours). What matters for the purposes of this post is that the unexpected happened.

According to Robert McKee in his must-have book for all fiction writers, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, one of the essential things that must happen in any story is that the protagonist does something expecting one result and gets another result. A result that leaves her off kilter, out of her comfort zone, in uncharted territory.

Character acts, gets an unexpected result, acts again, gets another unexpected result. McKee says that nearly every action the protagonist takes should have this result.

I had never thought about this before reading McKee, but now I notice it in every book I love. When the unexpected happens, characters reveal themselves. When our hero is out of his comfort zone, he will quickly start doing things that may not be characteristic on a “normal” day, but which reveal deep character because it’s an exceptional day.

Fiction, even day-in-the-life or stream-of-consciousness fiction, is never about an ordinary day or an ordinary series of events. It’s never about when the expected happens. It’s in the crisis or the fun-house of the unexpected that we come to care about a protagonist. It’s in the resolution of the unexpected that we leave characters in their “new normal.”

The “new normal” may look like the “old normal,” but it isn’t. Something has changed. It may just be the protagonist’s mind or heart; it may be the landscape. But something is permanently altered, all because of the unexpected.

Publishers of all genres now expect, even require, writers to help market their work. When Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman of Verse Wisconsin posed the question, “How do you find an audience?” to the small-press panelists at the Wisconsin Book Festival, Charles Nevsimal of Centennial Press kicked off a round of answers specifically directed at poets, but the advice is sound for fiction and nonfiction writers, too. Here’s what Charles and the others had to say:

Find or Build a Community

As a writer, you need to seek out other readers and writers and network. Start or join a book club or critique group. Join writers’ groups like the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets or Council of Wisconsin Writers or Romance Writers of America.

Attend Conferences and Events

Author appearances at local book stores are free; conferences cost money, but also provide access to agents, editors and instructors. Support other writers and share your work. Get invested in others’ writing, and get them invested in yours.

Give or Host Readings

Once your work is published, or publishing-ready, offer to give readings. Local libraries, civic or cultural groups with an interest in your subject, even friends’ book clubs are interested in the opportunity to speak with authors and you get a chance to raise your profile. Step up to the mic at a poetry slam. If you have a group or venue, host readings. You’ll meet other writers and interested readers.

Bribe Family and Friends

Bake them cookies; tune up their cars. Then twist their arms to talk up your book and your writing. Have them tell all of their friends. Ask them to ask their friends to tell more friends. Word of mouth matters.

Beg Booksellers

Chat up your local booksellers. Get them interested in your book, then ask them to recommend it to readers who might enjoy it. Offer to autograph copies if that will spur sales. Stop in often enough that you (and your book) are never far from their minds.

Use Guerilla Marketing Methods

Slip a bookmark with your book’s cover and information on it into books on the shelves in stores. Print broadsides with a poem or excerpt on one side, the sales information on the other and leave them in places where readers might find them: in the newspaper at Starbucks, on the subway/El/bus, on community bulletin boards.

Participate in Online Communities

Facebook. Twitter. You need to be there. And you need to craft your posts and tweets in a way that directs people to your writing, including opportunities to buy your books. Connect with people you know, and attract others based on the content of your wall/tweets. Be yourself, and connect your writing to you.

While Charles kicked off the answers, the other panelists all contributed to these suggestions. My pen wasn’t fast enough to catch the attributions, so I’ll just list the rest of the panel here and thank them for the terrific advice: B.J. Best, editor of Desperado Press; F.J. Bergman of Mobius-The Journal of Social Change; Lester Smith, president of Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and (I apologize for neglecting to mention this in the last post) president of Popcorn Press; Ralph Murray of Little Eagle Press, Wisconsin; Linda Aschbrenner of Marsh River Editions and former editor and publisher of Free Verse; and Richard Roe of Fireweed Press.

There was a fantastic panel discussion regarding poetry during the Wisconsin Book Festival. Several small-press publishers answered questions posed by Verse Wisconsin co-editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman. The publishers had a variety of takes on many questions, ranging from how long it should take to get a response on submissions to money and keeping a small press afloat.

But the topic I thought I’d put out here first is this: what is a chapbook? What constitutes a full-length book of poetry? And how does a poet approach assembling a collection?

The fast answer to the first question came from B.J. Best, editor of Desperado Press, who said a chapbook typically consists of 20 to 30 pages, though they can be longer or shorter, depending on the collection. A full-length collection is 48 pages or more.

Lester Smith, president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, noted that the work assembled in a chapbook is even more deeply thematically linked than the typical full-length collection.

Once poems have been published in chapbook form editors of small-press magazines or literary journals will no longer publish them, noted Linda Aschbrenner, who publishes Marsh River Editions and was the editor and publisher of Verse Wisconsin’s predecessor Free Verse for 11 years. She suggests, especially for a poet publishing a first chapbook, that at least half of the manuscript consist of poems that have previously been published in journals.

More chapbook facts shared by the panelists: chapbooks are typically staple-bound and have color only on the cover, and sometimes not even there. Chapbooks are faster and cheaper to produce than full-length collections, which are perfect bound and use color more liberally.

Other publishers on the panel included Charles Nevsimal of Centennial Press (which published the fantastic chapbook by Karla Huston pictured above), F.J. Bergman of Mobius-Journal of Social Change, Ralph Murray of Little Eagle Press (of Wisconsin, website coming soon) and Richard Roe of Fireweed Press (no website). I will share more about this informative discussion in coming posts.

Invariably, this question comes up at author events, and it came up Saturday at Doug W. Jacobson’s reading and talk about Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II. Doug’s presentation at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum was part of the Wisconsin Book Festival.

I spent the day in Madison, attending several presentations and readings, and I’ll blog about them this week–so much great stuff to share! But back to Doug, and the inevitable question.

How did you find a publisher? a woman at the back of the room asked during the Q&A.

Doug closed his mouth, hung his head for a moment as if collecting his thoughts, and smiled in retrospect. He couched his terms carefully. If you want to get published, you have to be a person who won’t be discouraged by rejection, he said. I have a stack of them. He held his hand above the top of the podium to indicate the height of his stack of rejections from agents and publishers.

Then Doug went on to outline how he wound up getting published, and because it’s not one of those exception stories (sent it out to the first agent, who got the book a six-figure advance, or a writer I knew sent it to his/her agent, etc.) I think it’s instructive.

Here’s the process Doug described:

He Paid for Advice

Doug, an engineer and business owner, had long toyed with the idea of writing a novel. He was inspired to begin writing Night of Flames after a trip to Europe during which he spent time in Belgium. Once he had a first draft of the novel, he took it to Judy Bridges, who runs Redbird Studio in Milwaukee. Judy is a reputable, highly regarded writing coach whose advice was well worth paying for. Judy suggested that while his research was impeccable, his fiction skills needed work.

He Joined a Facilitated Critique Group

Doug joined one of the Redbird Roundtables, where he received peer review from other writers who had works in progress, and from Judy, who facilitated the group. Doug was able to work on the weak areas of his novel, improve them and get the manuscript ready for submission.

He Sent Out His Manuscript

Doug followed the usual route of sending out his manuscript to agents and publishers, and though he had requests for first chapter, multiple chapters and the entire manuscript, he got no takers.

He Knew the Publishing Business

All the while, Doug subscribed to and read Publishers Weekly. Eventually, he saw a notice that McBooks was looking for action-oriented historical novels with a strong female protagonist. Since Doug’s two main characters are a married couple who are separated on the first day of the war, each taking a harrowing and heroic path through war-torn Europe to survive and to find each other, he approached McBooks with his query, one thing led to another, and his book was accepted and published.

Doug’s story is a terrific reminder that luck favors the prepared. And his happy ending was just the beginning. He’s had good luck with the book, and is nearing completion on his second novel, which will also be published by McBooks. The second novel is also set in World War II, and again covers ground seldom seen in historical or fictional accounts of WWII.

Slate.com is running a contest for the best 500-word or less short story about the worthless object in the picture above. Deadline is October 16. The contest is inspired by the Significant Objects project launched by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker featuring writers including Nicholson Baker, Curtis Sittenfeld and Colson Whitehead. Follow the link for more details on the contest.

The Wisconsin Book Festival kicked off yesterday, but tonight’s events begin the big weekend of readings, roundtables and other book-related offerings, starting with readings by Wisconsin authors Lorrie Moore and Michael Perry. Moore will read from her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, her first novel in ten years; Perry reads from his latest memoir, Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting.

But for me the highlights all happen on Saturday: Doug W. Jacobson reads from his novel, Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II at noon at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. Doug and I participated in a writer’s roundtable together for a couple of years, so I was lucky enough to read this novel in progress. Set in Poland and Belgium, the story has a fresh perspective on the years when the Nazis all but destroyed Europe and its Jewish population.

Next, as I mentioned yesterday, Sarah Busse participates in a roundtable about starting and sustaining small presses like her new venture, Verse Wisconsin.

I’ll follow that by attending the annual agent, editor and publisher panel, which is always gives me good ideas for freelance projects to pursue.

And to put a cherry on the day, there is an evening reading by acclaimed Wisconsin authors Jane Hamilton and David Rhodes. Hamilton is one of my favorite authors, and she’s a delightful, funny, generous reader. I’ve seen her speak many times. I also had the good fortune to take a one-day fiction class she taught, and it was terrific. Her modesty, humor and ability to get to the heart of what makes good fiction made the class highly worthwhile. Hamilton will read from her latest novel, Laura Rider’s Masterpiece. Rhodes, an acclaimed novelist who hasn’t published since a 1976 motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the chest down, reads from his new novel, Driftless.

There is a full lineup of events through Sunday, so check out the schedule. I hope to see you there!

Regular contributor Sarah Busse, together with co-editor Wendy Vardaman and advisory board members B. J. Best, Cathryn Cofell, Tom Erickson, David Graham and Angela Rydell, recently rolled out a print and online magazine, Verse Wisconsin.

Sarah and Wendy stepped in when Linda Aschenbrenner, a seemingly tireless supporter of Wisconsin poets, decided to retire and close up her magazine Free Verse. Verse Wisconsin is the new incarnation of the magazine, incorporating a compatible but distinct online edition.

Follow the link to the magazine’s website for information on everything from submission guidelines to themed issues (including an upcoming “Doors and Windows” theme, which is accepting submissions through November 1).

But if you’d like to meet Sarah and hear more about the decision to keep this small-press magazine alive (albeit in a new incarnation), you’ve got a chance to do just that this weekend. Sarah and other small-press publishers will hold a publishers roundtable, “Starting and Sustaining the Small Press,” 1:30 to 3 p.m. Saturday, October 10, at the main branch of the Madison Public Library.

The presentation is one of many this weekend, all part of the Wisconsin Book Festival. I can’t say enough good things about the Wisconsin Book Festival, but I’ll give a tip-of-the-iceberg heap-o’-praise on Thursday, as well as a preview of this year’s highlights.

Meantime, I want to wish Sarah and Wendy great good luck with Verse Wisconsin. I’ll be interviewing Sarah soon, and will post the interview here. If there’s anything you’d like me to ask Sarah about her new endeavor, send your question to comments.

Sarah Busse’s journal prompts are on hiatus as she and Wendy Vardaman participate in a series of speaking engagements for Verse Wisconsin. She’ll be back when her schedule permits.