Guy Gavriel Kay Guest Blog – Under Heaven, and the Book World Under Siege

‘Under Heaven, and the Book World Under Siege’

by Guy Gavriel Kay

A first public reading from a new novel is an interesting exercise. Over the years, and with eleven books now, I have learned (probably too slowly) how many variables go into what works and what doesn’t.

The starting point is to be aware that this is a public experience, not just for the author, but for the audience as well. How one reacts to writing in silence and privacy will be different from a response in a group of twenty-five at a bookstore, and different again if there are three or four hundred people in a theatre.

As I prepared to launch my newest book, Under Heaven, knowing a number of North American readings in various cities were to follow publication date, I went through a now-familiar exercise of deciding what I’d read, what I wanted listeners – possible readers – to hear as their first exposure to a novel based on the glittering period of Tang Dynasty China.

Mostly in the past few years, I read from early in the book. This has two virtues, or so it seems to me. One is that it reduces the time required for ‘backfill’ … you know, the explanations to bring the audience up to speed with what they need to know in order to make sense of what they are about to hear. This can be deadly dull, is usually rushed, often confusing – and confused or sleeping audiences are generally seen as counterproductive in this business.

The other benefit of reading an early section is that it reduces spoilers and readers are increasingly spoiler-phobic these days, especially with a long-awaited new book. (Don’t get me started on movie trailers telling the whole damned plot in three minutes, either.)

With Under Heaven I had the luxury of a test run, a focus group, even. I was at a conference in San Jose last autumn, six months before the book was to appear, and used the presence of a number of my readers (and the merely curious) to do a long first reading – essentially the first chapter of the novel. There is nothing like actually gauging the nature of an audience’s response to help fine-tune something like this.

But that convention weekend in California, and discussions with other writers and editors also fine-tuned something else for me: an awareness of the degree to which the literary world is shifting towards a foregrounding of personality as a way of marketing and selling our books.

It is a shift with implications that just keep rippling.

On Saturday night at that same gathering, I found myself in the hotel bar (no idea how that happened) with a literary agent from England. I want to stress, by way of context, that this wasn’t an especially young man (that matters) and he is an intelligent, well-read person (that matters, too).

As we watched a World Series game on the television in the bar (that doesn’t really matter, but it was a great game), the agent told me about his work methods these days.

He said that when dealing with any new submission by a writer looking to be taken on as a client, he’ll read a chapter or two. If the manuscript doesn’t work for him, he’ll stop and move to something else. If it shows promise, he still puts the manuscript aside and goes to his computer – to undertake a search for the prospective author-client in cyberspace.

He checks Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, looks for a webpage. He rattled off some other online acronyms and social networks that were merely a smattering of initials to me.  He does a Google image search to check how they look, hunts for the writer’s presence in comments on other writers’ blogs.

‘But why?’ I protested.

‘Because if I don’t see him strongly out there, I am far less likely to take him on as a client,’ he said. And sipped his scotch with impeccable timing (a former actor, actually).

I made the medieval sign against evil, and looked in vain for an oak tree around which to run counterclockwise. (The bar top was marble, no help.)

‘You can’t be serious!’ cried I.

‘Of course I am,’ he said patiently. ‘I need to know how much he or she will help me sell their books.’

I drank from my own scotch, less smoothly.

What are we to make of this, other than the absurdity of an author looking for oak trees inside a bar in California? My point here (to make it easy) is that while the book trade has always had an element of writers performing jigs (as Bernard Shaw once put it), the culture today has writers dancing as fast as they can, and on a daily or even hourly basis. Privacy, in so many ways, is under siege.

I am also aware that at the time of that conversation I had just finished the first reading from Under Heaven and, as I write these words, I am in the last stages of post-publication touring for that book. I’ve been dancing, in online interviews and through airports to book signings and in-person interviews pretty fast myself. There are ironies here. That’s what has me writing this.

The collision of many trends has created, like a mash-up of elements, a new book world reality. Take a ‘cult of personality’ society, add a severe cutback in marketing budgets, mix in the seductive ease of ‘broadcasting’ oneself online, siphon in reality shows with their vicious erosion of the very idea of privacy- and you have a literary world where the author is now his or her own marketing machine, however well or badly that machine is tuned.

This has many implications, but one of them has to do with a radical revision in what might be called the author-reader relationship. The principle consequence is the disappearance of spaces … between author and consumer and between author and work.

To an increasing degree, we sell our books on our personality online, as the agent suggested to me that night. Or, as he put it more carefully a bit later, on the personalities we construct for ourselves online.

There are consequences of all sorts to this blurring, or erasing, of borders and lines – to the emergence of an author as an online friend to readers, and I’m not just talking about time lost from work or what the word ‘friend’ really means in this context.

There’s a value to looking at a work of art separately from one’s sense of (or manufactured sense of) the artist who made it. And there’s importance to a space between artist and consumer.

The online world has seen ugly flare-ups where readers have viciously assailed authors for (as an example) being late with a promised manuscript. As if the delivery was something owed to the readership, part of some unwritten contract, the breach of which could legitimize cyber-rage. One well-known author, fighting complex challenges in a multi-volume project, had readers attack him on his own blog for watching too much football, taking a holiday with his wife, working on an editing project, not exercising enough.

One shakes one’s head (for starters). But there’s an aspect to this that needs to be noted. The only reason the readers knew of the football watching and the holiday was because the author had told them, on that same blog, had been in regular contact as to various elements of his life.  Another writer, a major bestseller, is reported to tweet up to a dozen times a day, to a massive army of Twitter followers. This is undeniably effective marketing and manipulation. It is also something expected now. Justin Bieber’s manager was quoted recently as saying, “If I see he’s not Twittering, I tell him ‘Get on your Twitter.’” Living in the glass house in which I dwell here, I am not going to twit said manager on using ‘twittering’ instead of ‘tweeting’. I am also aware that Bieber hasn’t written a book. Yet.

But this point hits the book world hard, as well. Readers feel a sense of connection – empowerment, even personal affection – for a writer online, but anyone in any kind of relationship knows that there are nuances that can kick in, and may lead to vitriol, or orders to get on an exercise bike and lose weight so the promised book won’t be forestalled by something really annoying like the author dying.

As yet another irony, one of the themes that emerged from my research for Under Heaven, is the recurrence of ‘balance’ as an element that engaged the great writers of the Tang Dynasty: the balance between withdrawing to work and think, and the pleasures (and duties) of taking a role on the public stage. Under Heaven picks up on this as a theme. It is partly a book about this tension, set against a backdrop of looming rebellion.

And today? It seems to me that we writers, hastening to forge these new bonds and links with readers, to fill the space left by an absence of publisher marketing, are willingly engaged in eroding our own privacy and the space that can be necessary to produce not only good art but a good life. It feels, at times, lemming-like. Tweet where the cliff is.

———————————————————————————————————————-
Guy Gavriel Kay is the #1 internationally bestselling author of ten previous novels and an acclaimed collection of poetry, Beyond This Dark House.

Kay was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and raised in Winnipeg. In the 1970’s he was retained by the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien to assist in the editorial construction of Tolkien’s posthumously published The Silmarillion. He returned to Canada from Oxford to take a law degree at the University of Toronto and was called to the Bar in Ontario.

Kay became Principal Writer and Associate Producer for the CBC radio series, “The Scales of Justice”, dramatizing major criminal trials in Canadian history. He also wrote several episodes when the series later moved to television. He has written social and political commentary for the National Post and the Globe and Mail and for The Guardian in England, and has spoken on a variety of topics at universities and conferences around the world.

In 1984, Kay’s first novel, The Summer Tree, the first volume of The Fionavar Tapestry, was published to considerable acclaim in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, and then in a number of countries and languages. In 1990 Viking Canada’s edition of his novel Tigana reached the national bestseller list, and his next book A Song for Arbonne debuted at #1 in Canada.

Translations now exceed twenty languages and Kay has toured and read on behalf of his publishers and at literary events in Canada, the United States, England, Poland, France, Russia, Croatia, Serbia, Mexico and Greece, among others, with his next international appearance being slated for June 2010 in Shanghai and Beijing. He has been nominated for and has won numerous literary awards including the World Fantasy Award and is the recipient of the International Goliardos Prize (presented in Mexico City) for his contributions to the literature of the fantastic. Guy Gavriel Kay’s work has inspired artists and writers around the world to create original music, verse, and art.

Kay lives in Toronto with his wife and sons.

Inspired by the glory and power of Tang dynasty China, Guy Gavriel Kay has created a masterpiece.

It begins simply. Shen Tai, son of an illustrious general serving the Emperor of Kitai, has spent two years honoring the memory of his late father by burying the bones of the dead from both armies at the site of one of his father’s last great battles. In recognition of his labors and his filial piety, an unlikely source has sent him a dangerous gift: 250 Sardian horses.

You give a man one of the famed Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You give him four or five to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank, and earn him jealousy, possibly mortal jealousy. Two hundred and fifty is an unthinkable gift, a gift to overwhelm an emperor.

Wisely, the gift comes with the stipulation that Tai must claim the horses in person. Otherwise he would probably be dead already…

“Kay is a genius. I’ve read him all my life and am always inspired by his work. You will love UNDER HEAVEN.” – #1 New York Times Bestselling author Brandon Sanderson

“I loved, loved, loved UNDER HEAVEN. It had everything in it that made me such a fan of Guy Kay in the first place. I thought the new one was perfect.” –Nancy Pearl, Book Commentator NPR “Morning Edition”

“Kay delivers an exquisitely detailed vision of a land much like Tang Dynasty China… the complex intrigues of poets, prostitutes, ministers and soldiers evolve into a fascinating, sometimes bloody, and entirely believable tale.” – Publishers Weekly, *starred review

“Meticulously researched yet seamlessly envisioned, the characters and culture present a timeless tale of filial piety and personal integrity.” –Library Journal, *starred review

“Kay says he wants his readers to keep turning pages until two a.m. Under Heaven should certainly help him achieve that goal. The plot is intricate, including fascinating by-ways and characters as real as they are numerous. Yet the main thread—Tai’s journey to court and the resolution of who gets the horses—is never lost.” —Booklist

“A magnificent epic, flawlessly crafted, that draws the reader in like a whirlwind and doesn’t let go.” —The Huffington Post

About BSCreview Guest

Guests are handpicked awesome that the BSC Empire brings in for your advanced online pleasure. More often than not they are people (most of them) more talented than the owners of the site, thus their opinions are their own. We claim their conquests only.