Argh Ink

Nothing drives me crazier than author quotes. I hate asking for them, and probably 95% of the people I have asked for them have ignored me completely, which serves me right because I don’t give quotes to 95% of the people who ask me for them. The whole practice is a mass of desperation and bad feeling and you’d think it would just collapse in upon itself except for one thing: It really does generate sales.

The author quote is that sentence on the cover that says “A great read!” followed by the name of an author the publisher hopes you recognize and like. The real gets are Nora Roberts, Stephen King, John Grisham, and that ilk, but enough people want Jenny Crusie that I end up with stacks of manuscripts growing surly in the corners of my living room. I take them because I WANT to give author quotes. I want to help other people, it makes me feel warm all over, and besides that, it’s good for me to have my name on other authors’ book covers. It makes people think I’m somebody. They look at the cover and think, “Well, I’ve never heard of Jennifer Crusie but her name is right there so she must be famous,” and there goes my name recognition, up a notch.

For this reason, some of my friends are Quote Whores, and I say this with affection because they’re good people who like giving other authors a boost in sales. “Don’t send me the book,” they tell people, “just put on ‘I loved it!’ Melinda Q. Whore.” And everybody wins, the author, the quoter, the publisher . . . Well maybe not the reader. I did this once, just once, many years ago, for an author I really liked as a person, without reading the book. Then I saw a reader post online that she’d bought the book because my quote was on it and hadn’t liked it at all. She was very nice about it, she said, “Well, everybody’s tastes are different.” So I went out and bought the book. I didn’t like it, either. And I thought about that reader who bought the book, and wondered how much money she’d had to spend on books, if that had been a lot for her, about how she’d sat down that evening, anticipating a good read, thought about all the times I’d been in her shoes, and, basically, I took myself off the Quote Streets that night. Friends, I got religion. I also lost a lot of author friends that night because I don’t care how close we are or how much I love you personally, if I don’t adore your book, I ain’t quoting for it. I’ve alienated some editors, too, including the one who actually had the nerve to send me a quote and then said, “We’ll just put your name on this if that’s all right.” After my agent peeled me off the ceiling, she told the editor it wouldn’t be all right, but many kind-hearted authors would have been fine with that. They want to help other authors out. (Don’t get me started on editors, like the ones who take a quote off an author’s book I DID quote for and put it on another book by that author that I DID NOT quote for . . .)

There are other authors who help without betraying their mortal souls. If you look closely at some quotes, you can see the fudge in effect. “Her characters have depth and passion” may mean “but she can’t plot her way out of a paper bag.” “The plot is fast-paced and action-packed” often glosses over the fact that “the characters are straight out of central casting.” Some authors are even more clever (well, we do make our livings with words): one very well known author who kept secret the fact that she was wheel-chair-bound quoted for a book by saying, “I read it in one sitting.”

And then there are the bitches like me. We don’t just have to like the book, we have to love it. It has to be so good that we really would tell our friends about it and say, “You have to read this,” and pass it on to them. Which wouldn’t be so bad except I’ve been writing and teaching writing for a long, long time now, and I am cranky about many things. So when I pick up a book, the writer will lose me in the first chapter if he or she . . .

Stops the story for infodump. Keep it in the now, or I am gone. Any time the writer stops to tell me things about the character or the past or anything else that isn’t actually the story at hand, I am going to stop reading. Period. I bet I put down 90% of the manuscripts I get just because of this. It’s lazy writing.

Head hops. If the book is in third limited and the writer doesn’t have enough craft to stay in one head, I don’t want to go on a ride with her or him.

Makes grammatical errors. I know the copy editor should have caught them. But a writer’s words are her tools. The writer should have caught them.

Tells me a story I’ve heard a million times before. If I’m on the third page and I’ve anticipated every damn move the writer’s made so far, I’m going to start flipping through the book. And if it’s pretty much the same old, same old, I’m done.

Makes the protagonist too dumb to live. I’m okay with making mistakes, I make mistakes, just make them smart mistakes, the kind of mistakes I’d make. I want to relate to the protagonist, not look at the book and think, “What a dumbass.”

Of course, I’ll let any of those go if I get caught up by the narrative and the voice and swept into the world of the story. Then all bets are off and I’m there. That takes a helluva writer though.

So we’re good and I’m reading and it’s a great book and I’m close to the end and I’m thinking, “AT LAST, I can quote for a book,” because I really, really, really do love to quote for books, I WANT to quote for books, and then I get to the end and it’s eh. There’s just no big bang there. It’s okay. It was nice. But I sort of want to wait until the author is asleep and then sneak off and re-read the climax of another’s author’s book that I already know I love so I can get the payoff I need. And I think, “I don’t want to do this to a reader.” So I don’t quote. It’s really sad.

Now, you want to know the really really sad part? Most of the time, I never get to the book. Because there’s a window of time that they need the quote in. And I have my priorities.

First is my writing.
Second is business.
Third is daily life like running the sweeper before the dog hair gets higher than the end tables and crocheting and watching Project Runway (will somebody please just slap the hell out of Jeffrey?) and reading for pleasure (when is Pratchett’s next book coming out?)
Fourth is everything else like reading for quotes.

So I try to tell people I’ll probably never get to their books, but if I were them, I’d send them, too. I have to get a better system because I WANT TO QUOTE, but . . .

So the whole quote thing. It’s a problem, but it works so it’s here to stay. I swear to remain pure, if annoying, and even so the system isn’t going to work for everybody because there are still people who don’t like the books I legitimately love. But the ones I really do love, I really do want to recommend, so I promise to try to get to those manuscripts faster. As soon as I get this book done and find somebody to quote for it . . .