Thursday, October 08, 2009

Thinking in Boxes

In March I read at the Huddersfield Literature Festival with two other Salt authors, story writer Carys Davies and poet Mike Barlow, at an event titled 'Salt of the Earth'. It's a strange thing, the way you get billed like this, almost as a representative of your publisher, rather than simply of your own writing. Although on this occasion that's how we offered ourselves, as a cohort of Salt authors, it is quite often the festival or independent events organizers who do this - decide to bill an event as a 'Salt' event: this has happened with an imminent Manchester Literature Festival event and another at Manchester Central Library in December (in both of which I'm taking part). My publisher has certainly made a splash as a small independent publisher of poetry and (so far) short fiction, and appears to have caught everyone's attention and imagination and the good thing about this is that it's a great publicity/marketing hook for events organizers and we, its authors, alike.

But at that Huddersfield reading, a question was asked by festival director Michael Stewart - who, indeed, I believe had given the event its name, 'Salt of the Earth' - a question that raised issues we three authors were unable to tackle fully at the time, and which I've only touched on since. What, he asked, did we think of the difference between Salt and Comma (Ra Page's Manchester independent, publishing chiefly short fiction), the difference as he saw it being that Comma was a 'high-concept' publisher and that Salt... Well, to be honest, I can't swear what he said Salt did, but at the time, perhaps influenced by the connotations of his title for our event and the fact that he referred as example to my having recently won a prize in the Raymond Carver competition, we interpreted him as saying that Salt published realist fiction, and swiftly stated the fact we know to be true: that Salt does not just publish realist writing, but is a broad church committed only to literary excellence (no one would call Carys's own contemporary fairy tales realist, or the science-inspired fantasies of Salt author Tania Hershman - and, as I put in, I wouldn't even call my Raymond Carver competition story realist but an attempt to critique the whole concept of realism).

The trouble was, we had failed to understand the term 'high-concept', or at any rate, speaking for myself, I had, taking it as a literary term meaning concerned with ideas and style rather than 'realist' notions of real life and character and story. It seems ridiculous now, because the term is now everywhere, but back then in March I hadn't understood that 'high-concept' is a marketing term denoting something almost opposite: a graphic notion which catches attention and is easily grasped, and is thus desirable for marketing any book. Ra Page's anthologies of short stories are indeed 'high-concept' in this sense, in that they are themed, usually around such a graphic notion, and I understand that some of his single-author collections, such as Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman, are commissioned to be written around a unifying concept agreed beforehand. Salt, on the other hand, publish single author collections only and do not have that anthologist's need to shoe-horn diverse writers, and they don't commission collections to precalculated themes. However, contrary to what I think now was Michael's suggestion - which unfortunately I think our 'broad church' answer may have seemed to corroborate - Salt by no means eschew the high-concept marketing principle: director Chris-Hamilton Emery has made it clear that, while literary excellence is his touchstone, his books must be marketable with a clear, attractive concept (and fortunately for us Salt authors, when it comes to marketing matters like readings, we also have the Salt banner to wave).

But the big question arises: how do we market our books thus without reducing them? I have frequently railed against themed anthologies (although, succumbing to marketing pressures, I have published them) and the way in which they can force sometimes reductive readings on individual stories. By succumbing of necessity to the 'high-concept' sell, do we divert readers away from certain aspects of our work which are perhaps important to us? And does that matter? To be perfectly frank with you, as a writer the thing I'm really interested in, and would like my readers to share an interest in, is the ways we think, but tell that to the bookshop buyers and the Saturday browsers! Fortunately (or not) I come from a family in which you can soon get your leg pulled for sitting around and looking like you're thinking too much, so I learned early on the value of narrative and concrete detail for luring people into ideas, often by making them identify. But which do you stress when you're marketing? This is the stumbling block over which my first novel, The Birth Machine, (which wasn't originally called that), fell from being about logic and science and intuition and aimed more at men than women, into being sold and read as a feminist novel about childbirth aimed only at women. What I'm particularly interested in is the way we think in boxes, and a lot of my writing is about showing the falsity of those boxes. But you can't stop people reading in boxes, it seems, and one story of mine in which I tried to deconstruct concepts of class (and race) ended up in one critic's eyes as a depiction of a 'rolling working-class childhood' while in another's as being 'about a middle-class child'. I'm particularly keen to show the lack of dividing line between the 'ordinary' and the 'out-of-the-ordinary', but people seem reluctant to accept the fuzziness of this, and want to categorize. Several critics have stressed that my story collection is about 'ordinary lives' and, well, I'm just sitting here thinking: what, your dad beats you up and was a Jewish refugee; your next-door-neighbour is a famous opera singer; you're a mother with a newborn baby and you're losing it and you suddenly run away from a family outing across the sand dunes - these are ordinary? You take a stranger back to your hotel room for sex before you've hardly had time to speak to him? - well, I guess there's no accounting for what some people think of as ordinary, which rather proves my original literary point. And how much does 'high-concept' marketing exacerbate such simplifications? (How much is this reading of my stories influenced by my marketing blurb, which concentrated on the concrete and readily graspable?)

I've got a new novel out, so you can see why this matter is taxing me... (Luckily, it concerns a mystery, which is one 'high concept' that doesn't require things pinned down.)

6 comments:

Kate said...

I think from the point of a marketeer we tend to try and find about three angles that we think will be the most sucessful. Unfortunately somethings these are actually very untrue to the book. I will say in our defense we only tend to get a synopsis of the book to promote and an idea of the target reader so sometimes we are way off base. It's hard though some amazine pieces of writing don;t seem to do well and soem utter rubbish flies of the shelves...

Sorry this post was absolutely no help!

Kate xx

Elizabeth Baines said...

Actually, that's interesting, Kate, that you work on three angles...

Kate said...

I just read the spelling on that message - so sorry I was really tired! Yes we do pick more than one key selling point but the boss will choose the most commercially viable one or ones to run with.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Ah, right!

Tania Hershman said...

This is very interesting, Elizabeth (as always). Thank you for the mention of my book, which does trigger me to thinking about his "high concept" idea and how it applies to me. Salt did ask us, before our books came out, to think of our "unique selling points", and the fact that half of my stories are inspired by science articles is, I guess, pretty unique. Is that "high concept"? The thing is, I know that getting the review in New Scientist has made an enormous amount of difference, created some "hype". But then there was one review on Amazon by someone who had read the "hype" and ended up feeling disappointed. Persuading people to buy something because of the "box" may get their money, but whether they enjoy it is, surely, about whether your book is in the "right" box or not. This Amazon reader was expecting something - perhaps more like science fiction, or less like literary fiction, and he didn't get it. The readers of your collection who were expecting "ordinary lives" most certainly did not get that! Can we refused to be boxed, or are we shooting ourselves in the foot again - once by writing "literary" fiction which sells far less, and again by refusing to get in the box?

Elizabeth Baines said...

It's very tricky, Tania. I've always said you can sell anything, and you can, but the trouble is once the customer opens the bottle and finds what's really inside it they're not coming back this snakeoil salesman again. And if we want to avoid this, since some things are clearly more 'high-concept' than others, must we be forced to choose only 'high concept' subjects and eliminate others? I don't have time to re-read it just at the mo, but as far as I remember the Waxman Lit Agency post I link to rather muddies all this: it starts out seeming to state that you can still write what you want to write, the important thing is to find a good concept for selling it, but then slips over into implying (or even stating) that you need a 'high concept' idea in the first place.
And by the way, I do think you have a high concept for The White Road... though of course you have never sold them as science fiction, which seems to be what the Amazon reviewer was expecting. Which is another whole issue, of course: it's not even down to the things we SAY in our blurbs, but the expectations of careless browsers and the triggers we pull in their minds...!