And the Author is....

A special episode of First Edition

In the last post, I teased the subject of the next episode of First Edition. And now that the episode is live, you can see the answer.

A few things you will learn in this episode:

1. That it is possible to start a writing career by pulling a “How to Get Published” book off the shelf at a bookstore (in this case it was Borders, RIP).

2. That you should ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR WORK.

3. That sometimes it is hard to impress your parents even if you sell millions books.

I’ve had the idea for this kind of episode for a long time. I am thinking of it as a “bookography”: the story of how a book came to be, and what happened to out after publication. There are other important people in the story besides the author, of course; in future versions I would love to have the agent and editor chime it.

So many of the books that matter (to readers, to culture, to the industry, and to history) have a story of their own that gets lost somewhere between the story of the author and readers’ reactions to it. And these stories are best told while the people who were there are still around. It’s also true that some books become more notable than their authors. In these cases, their particular, strange, and fascinating journeys won’t get told as part of a biography or other literary history.

Here are a few books I have in mind for good candidates.

1. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Smith has become revered, and White Teeth had heat when it came out. How does Smith feel about it now? What did the editing process look like?

2. White Noise by Don DeLillo. One of the signal novels of the 20th Century, and it came a few books in for DeLillo. How much did it change his career? Or other others thought of him? Or how he thought of himself?

3. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Now, Dan Brown has taken some hits recently. But this was an absolute cultural monster. I can’t imagine what it was like to be in the middle of this hurricane.

4. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Remember how big of a deal this was? And how no one talks about it now? Even now, I can’t quite wrap my head around why and how this became so well-known as to inspire knock-offs and satirical versions.

Anyway, I’m keeping a list and hope to do more of these. If you have an idea for a book that would be a good candidate, leave it in the comments.

Thanks for reading and listening. Until next time, read something great.

Jeff

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