Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
 David Menconi is the music critic at the daily paper in Raleigh, North
 Carolina, the News & Observer. He has also written for Spin, Billboard,
 Request, No Depression and a host of other publications that no longer
 exist. He resides in a creaky and decadent Victorian house in downtown
 Raleigh with his wife Leigh and three children Aaron, Edward and
 Claudia. "Off The Record" is his first novel.
 
 Take a volatile rock band, a king-making concert promoter, a downtrodden
 club owner and a rock critic with questionable journalistic ethics; add
 one hit record, a drug problem, a couple of riots and shake well. There
 you have the essence of this novel, the very unauthorized account of the
 rise and fall of the Tommy Aguilar Band. "Off The Record" will confirm
 your worst suspicions about the music business, an industry in which
 musicians are like the infantry -- the first to die, and the last to get
 paid. 

 Leading the discussion is Ed Ward, who was a rock critic from 1967 
 until sometime in the mid-80s, at which time "the inevitable parricidal 
 impulse, mixed with some misunderstandings about my stand on censorship, 
 caused me to be blackballed by most of the magazines. I had David's job 
 (or a similar one) at the Austin American-Statesman from 1979-1984, 
 responsible for two columns, two features, and three reviews a week, 
 which ought to hip you that it's not a Guild paper. Currently I live in 
 Berlin and write about art and culture for the Wall St. Journal Europe, 
 and contribute to Fresh Air on NPR." 
 
 Please join me in welcoming David and Ed to inkwell.vue!
  

    <scribbled by captward Thu 4 Apr 02 09:39>
  

    
> What went wrong with the regular publishing industry?
>

Almost everything that could, I’m afraid. After years of false starts,
I finally started writing this book for real in late 1994. The first
draft took about 3 years, which I spent in cloistered isolation; I told
very few people what I was doing, and didn’t let anyone actually see
it until after the first draft was done. I didn’t do any of the
networky things one is supposed to do — join writers’ groups, go to
readings, etc. — and maybe that had something to do with what happened
next.

Finding an agent was very difficult, far moreso than I expected. I did
the drill they tell you to do — scoured “Writers Market,” looked for
names in the acknowledgements section of other similar books, sent
queries and sample chapters. But most of the agents I approached were
completely unresponsive. The ones who bothered to respond at all passed
with the explanation that, “Rock novels are a tough sell.”

This appears to be conventional wisdom in the publishing industry, for
reasons I can’t fathom. I guess there haven’t been any hugely
successful, best-selling rock novels (“High Fidelity” is probably the
closest, although I’ve never really thought of that as a rock novel per
se). But you’d think it’s a subject with built-in appeal, plus a
readymade and easy-to-reach audience. Guess again. It seems to be like
anything else — it’s not what you do or even who you know, but who
knows you. So if you’re Bill Flanagan, a bigtime mucky-muck at VH1, you
can get a deal with Simon & Shuster and a sizable advance for “A&R” (a
book with some similarities to mine). But if you’re a critic at a
midsize newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina, it’s a lot tougher.

After several dozen turn-downs, I did finally find an agent who was
willing to take me on in late 1998. The initial stages of the process
were very positive. He had excellent editing suggestions, and I think
his input improved the book a lot. By the summer of 1999, I had revised
it to his satisfaction. He started sending it out in June of that
year...

...And nothing happened. He sent it to about a dozen places, and no
one bit. I got very little feedback as to what publishers thought or
why they passed, just that they had. The next thing I heard from my
agent was that he was leaving the literary field for personal reasons,
and that was that. By the spring of 2000, I was on my own again.

At that point, my options were to start looking for another agent (not
an appealing prospect), or try to do something on my own. I opted for
the latter, mostly because I was getting such good feedback from music
people who read it. This happened over and over again. As far as I
could tell, the publishing industry dismissed this book out of hand
because it was a somewhat unusual subject. Meanwhile, I was passing
around copies to clubowners and people in bands — the sort of people I
imagined to be the book’s potential audience — and they invariably
understood it, and liked it.

I decided to go the print-on-demand route in May of 2000, and started
working on the aforementioned website
(http://www.OffTheRecordBook.com). I signed up with iUniverse in early
July and did their submission drill, and it was ready to go by late
September of 2000. It cost me $134.

A quick primer on how print-on-demand portals like iUniverse work: You
submit everything (your manuscript copy, cover art, jacket copy)
either by e-mail or on a computer disc. They typeset it on their
computers, and send you page proofs by e-mail. After you return the
page proofs, it takes several weeks for them to make it available.

Once they have it ready to go, your book can be ordered from the
bookstore at the iUniverse website (http://www.iuniverse.com/). It’s
also listed on amazon and the Barnes & Noble website, bn.com. And it
has an ISBN serial number, so you can order it through any
brick-and-mortar bookstore. When orders come in, iUniverse makes copies
and ships them, one at a time. Authors can also order discounted
copies for readings, which is how I’ve sold most of my books.

Now, there’s no substitute for having books physically in stores for
impulse buys, and for clerks to talk up. But POD does at least enable
you to get a book out into the world to see if there’s an audience for
it out there. It’s also a farm system of sorts for the publishing
industry. If a publisher comes along and wants to buy your book, you
can get out of the iUniverse deal at any time with 90 days notice. “Off
The Record” has attracted a lot of favorable press, including good
reviews in the Los Angeles Daily News, Arizona Republic and Salon. I’m
hoping to parlay that into a deal with a publisher before too much
longer, and there are a few possibilities. I also have an agent again,
funny thing.
  

    
 Funny thing indeed.   Nothing succeeds like success, I guess. But
your story is pretty common for a first-time novelist. Forget what you
do for a living; unless you were the bright star of the fiction farm
system (all those writers conferences and -- shudder -- creative
writing departments at university level), you'd get the same response. 

Which is weird; the publishing industry's never figured out that rock
and roll is a world, not just a name on a record bin. People like to
read about it, and not just the sanitized fan books and the endless
regurgitation of the pages of Rolling Stone. You really can market
things other than records to people if it has a connection with the
music. We know this, but the publishing industry is stuck in another
time, I think.

Backtracking a little, something weird happened to my initial post.
I'm not sure how it happened, but it did, and it's electrons now. 

What I did was begin by welcoming David to this interview, and telling
him that because I was so intimate with the kind of job he does for a
living, discussing that aspect of the book, which features a guy who
does what David does for a living as one of the central characters,
didn't appeal to me as much as discussing the publishing end of it,
especially since, with the website and the publish-on-demand aspects,
that was more interesting to me. 

We'll also have <jonl> along to ask about the book itself, and I think
<tnf>, who's on tour at the moment, is also going to chime in with the
musician's viewpoint. 

Should be cool. Stick around. 
  

    
David, I'm curious about the relationship of this novel to your own
experiences, or what you've observed, working as a rock critic. There's
a rumor that TAB (the Tony Aguilar Band), which for those who havent'
read it is the focus of the novel, is based loosely on the 'alternative
country' band Whiskeytown, and I found myself wondering if you put
much of yourself into the Ken Morrison character...?
  

    
Starting with TAB’s connection to real-world people/places/things, I
would liken “Off The Record” to Peter Gent’s “North Dallas Forty” — a
novel about professional football that I read during my formative
years, and found hugely influential. I believe that most everything
depicted in “North Dallas Forty” did happen; but probably not to just
one guy and not all in the same week. Same with “OTR,” which is fairly
over-the-top. TAB, the protagonist band, fills a rather Job-like role;
they’re on the business end of more bad karma than you could possibly
imagine. Everything that happens in the book is rooted in reality (even
if it's just rumor), but exaggerated for dramatic purposes.

As for how Whiskeytown figures into this, they wandered into my life
at about the time I was “casting” the book. They were a local band here
in Raleigh, just getting started in 1994-95, and I them play many
times. They didn’t sound much like the fictional TAB (in my head, TAB
sounds like a poppier version of the old punk band X, fronted by the
sort of singing you could imagine hearing on the radio). But for an
unstable band led by a cocky/crazy-smart young lunatic, you could not
ask for a better real-life model than Whiskeytown.

Ryan Adams was the aforementioned cocky/crazy-smart young lunatic, and
a lot of his mannerisms and attitudes wound up creeping into the
character of Tommy Aguilar. Tommy isn’t Ryan, but it became useful to
think of Tommy speaking in Ryan’s voice when I was mulling dialogue.
It’s been strange watching Ryan turn into a star the past six months. A
lot of the magazine profiles you see of him nowadays read like
something out of the book (especially the Rolling Stone one back in
November; and there was a big CMJ profile that read like Ryan and the
writer were auditioning for bit parts in “Almost Famous”). Ryan is a
lot more like the caricature of Tommy now than he was when I was
writing “OTR.”

Which brings us to Ken Morrison, the rock-critic character. There’s a
disclaimer in the book’s credits where I make a point of saying that I
am not Ken Morrison, but I acknowledge that we’ve “met a time or two.”
He’s not me, but I do understand his temptations, frustrations and
dilemmas. I’d also like to think I’m not as much of a dope as he turns
out to be — that I could avoid getting used the way he does. But as
with Ryan and Tommy, yes, there are some things that have happened to
me that also happen to Ken.

Ken was the hardest character in the book to get right. In my first
draft, he really was me, basically — which I wanted to avoid. That was
one of the reasons I wrote it in third-person rather than through any
one first-person character. Moreover, Ken-as-me just didn’t work. Ken
needed to be a lot flashier and more self-aggrandizing, somewhat of a
weasel; but also not unlikable. He moves the plot along in some key
places, so the reader has to care about him at least a little. And he
does eventually come around to the right side.

But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t also deserve a pretty thorough
beat-down.
  

    
It was cool to find some of TAB's music on the web site. Would I be 
breaking the voodoo if I asked how you put that together? And whether you 
got the sound you were after?
  

    

I enlisted some pals in local bands, and they got together one night
and bashed out some music over a few cases of beer. The ringleader was
a fellow named Kenny Roby, who used to lead the alt.country/soul band 6
String Drag (they did a fantastic cover of Sir Douglas Quintet’s
‘‘Mendocino’’ on the soundtrack to the movie ‘‘You Can Count On Me’’;
and their 1997 album ‘‘High Hat’’ is also terrific, produced by Steve
Earle). Roby cut his teeth playing snotty punk rock, so this was kinda
like a roots move for him.

He jokingly called the group El Beau. One of the first readings I did
here in Raleigh, they played a show afterward as TAB (which devolved
into quite a drunken occasion, as you can probably imagine). Some of
the songs they did were based on lyrics and descriptions in the book,
others were just stuff they made up on the fly.

It wasn’t exactly the sound I had in mind; but I was not in a position
to be too choosy, either, and I’m more than happy with the job they
did. Since then, Roby has occasionally played a couple of these songs
live, and even talked about recording one of them. He asked if I wanted
a co-writing credit, but I told him to just give the credit to Tommy
Aguilar.
  

    
Hey, you're passing up some potential royalties there. I'm still
waiting for the dough for my 1/5 of a Joe "King" Carrasco song. 
  

    
El Beau, eh?  I worked for 12 years for Elvin Bishop. His nickname to
pals was/is Elbow. We always figured the band should have been granted
stock option from Budweiser for his heroic adventures under the
influence.
  

    
So, David, you made any dough off of this book yet? What's the
breakdown with the publish-on-demand folks, anyway? Is it better (I'm
sure it is, but maybe the question is how much better) than you'd get
from a "real" publisher? 
  

    
Since you're a rock critic, I'm wondering how the ethics thing works
when you have musicians providing favorable book blurbs. Or are the
quotes from people you'll never review again?
  

    

Welcome to the inkwell, David!

I got a call from our mutual friend G. Brown of the Denver Post yesterday,
and he sends his greetings.
  

    
> Hey, you're passing up some potential royalties there. I'm still
> waiting for the dough for my 1/5 of a Joe "King" Carrasco song.
>

Well, since I wasn't able to pay anyone for their help, I figured the
two bits that song generates might be a start!!

You asked if I've made any dough -- yes, but not enough so's anybody
would notice (when you add in what I spend on webhosting, postage &
such). But as you well know, books don't really pay. You do get a
slightly better royalty from POD publishers than conventional ones, but
not huge. They pay 20 percent, while the standard publishing deal
seems to pay about 15 percent. There's another rate for digital
downloads, but I do not believe anybody has bought the book that way
yet.
  

    
>El Beau, eh?  I worked for 12 years for Elvin Bishop. His nickname to
pals was/is Elbow. We always figured the band should have been granted
stock option from Budweiser for his heroic adventures under the
influence.>

I've never met Mr. Bishop, but have heard he could knock 'em back with
the best of 'em out there.
  

    
>Since you're a rock critic, I'm wondering how the ethics thing works
when you have musicians providing favorable book blurbs. Or are the
quotes from people you'll never review again?>

Mostly, it's a let-your-conscience-be-your-guide kinda thing. As with
most aspects of the rock-write racket (a profession that seems to
operate under the premise that conflict of interest is no big deal if
that's what it takes in the name of access), there is no guidebook.
It's very possible I might never have cause to review Mojo Nixon again,
for example. And with the rest, I figure a good amount of time will
have to go by before I write about a blurb-provider again; and chances
are, it will take something really extraordinary to get me to type
their name again.
  

    
>I got a call from our mutual friend G. Brown of the Denver Post
yesterday, and he sends his greetings.>

Tell that rascal hidy from here, too. "Off The Record" has a bit of a
G. Brown tribute. One night many years ago, G. spread the word that the
Rolling Stones were going to play an unannounced club show (at the
Blue Note in Boulder, I believe). A crowd gathered, but when the time
came it was G. onstage lip-synching & playing air guitar to a Stones
bootleg. Ken, the critic in "OTR," does something similar. He also
accompanies a band onstage and "plays" a typewriter at another show, a
la Lester Bangs.
  

    

From Gil Asakawa:



Yo David, two questions:

1. Give us the nuts and bolts (I'm too lazy to poke around iUniverse to find
out for myself) -- how much did it cost for you to actuallly do the book
with them? I inagine you pay some sort of fee upfront for them to do the
production wrk, then they make the majority of the money back on books sold?
Even at a better royalty than the trades, you'd have to sell some big
numbers to be able to say you had a "bestseller," right? Then again, it's a
great book and you're still getting mileage out of it, so in that sense it's
a terrific success. But, did it cost you (other than 3 years and a lot of
quiet evenings at home) to make the book?

2. Has there been anyone who recognized a story in the book as something
that happened to them?

Cool chat!
Gil
  

    
Thank ya, Gil. As for nuts and bolts, yep, there's an upfront fee to
get online with iUniverse. It cost me $134, a price that has gone up
somewhat; I think it's about $200-$300 now for most books (depending on
which package you select). My book's cover price is $19.95, and a 20
percent royalty comes to about $4 per book. So I was at the break-even
point at 34 books sold (and I sold more books than that at my first
reading).

Of course, it's more complicated than that. I only had to pay
iUniverse $134 to do the book, but I've spent more on other things --
webhosting for the website, postage, long-distance phone calls, review
copies. Plus I make more than $4 on books I sell directly to people;
more like $8-$9 on those, since iU authors can get a 45 percent
discount on books they order for readings & such. But I make *less*
than $4 for books sold through amazon, since iU only pays the 20
percent royalty rate on the wholesale price amazon pays.

Bottom line, you can get a book out into the world pretty cheap
through iUniverse. But you can't just throw something out there and
expect anyone to notice; that's just step one in a very long, involved
process. Don't do this if you're impatient, or unwilling to bust your
tail flogging it for a good long time.

Reality check time: POD is not a magic bullet, either. Dealing with
iUniverse is about like dealing with an HMO, in terms of their general
level of efficiency and humanity. I would advise anybody thinking about
doing this to set it up in such a way that you depend on them for as
little as possible, and you won't be disappointed. One bad thing is
that they get to determine the price of your book. Originally, they
wanted to charge $25.95 for mine, which I thought was way too high.
After much begging/pleading, I got that down to $19.95 -- still higher
than I'd like, but workable.

I should also note that it's very difficult to sell too many books
this way, even if you get a lot of press (and I've scored several dozen
reviews, in some pretty visible places). It is possible to sell
hundreds of books through POD; but I'm not sure you can get into the
thousands unless you've got a website that already gets a lot of
traffic. POD would be perfect for a musician of the stature of, say,
Jerry Jeff Walker, who already does a lot of his business on the web.
Just put a link on his website, and I expect he would clean up.

As for question #2, yep, plenty of folks have picked up on things in
the book that pertained to them -- including the aforementioned G.
Brown. I have yet to encounter anybody who was angry about having
something they did fictionalized (most seem flattered, in fact), so
that's good.
  

    
amazon takes a HUGE chunk out of stuff they sell.  They take 55% of the price
of my CD over there.
  

    

What does a POD book look like?  Is it properly bound?
  

    
>What does a POD book look like?  Is it properly bound?>

It is indeed properly bound, and looks like a pretty standard trade
paperback book (and anybody out there who has a copy of "Off The
Record," please feel free to chime in). I was very pleased with the
typesetting and layout job iUniverse did on my book. They'll also
design a cover at no charge, but I didn't take them up on that. I got
my brother Andy to do one for me. He's a crackerjack graphic artist/web
designer, got a degree in computer animation from the Art Institute of
SF. There's a link to his site from the "Credits" link at the bottom
of my http://www.OffTheRecordBook.com site, for anybody who wants to
see more of his stuff.
  

    
p.s. Oh yeah, and my brother Andy also did an incredibly cool
multi-media trailer that's on the website; the link for that is at the
top of the page (you'll need Flash to watch that).
  

    
So you're not getting rich off of the book...are you getting famous?
No, that's a serious question: have you had inquiries from magazines
who want you to write for them, or (heh heh, fat chance, I know, but it
happens) bites from film producers?
  

    
To the book. I found the first section remarkably spot on, vis a vis a
small club scene the *glamour* of a crammed in a van tour.  Have you
spent time on the road, or was that pretty much extrapolated from
talking with players? Either way, you nailed it with extreme prejudice.
  

    
>So you're not getting rich off of the book...are you getting famous?
No, that's a serious question: have you had inquiries from magazines
who want you to write for them, or (heh heh, fat chance, I know, but it
happens) bites from film producers?>

It has done wonders in terms of visibility among my fellow rock
critics; but that has not really translated into inquiries from
magazines beyond a few things here and there (just my luck to be doing
this at a time when the magazine world seems to be collapsing even
faster than the record business).

Actually, there have been a few tantalizing nibbles on the film end of
things. But so far, it has come to naught (and my fingers are starting
to hurt from keeping them crossed for so long). Most everybody who has
read the book says it has film potential, so here's hoping.