Author Archives: Austin Dewar

Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor

Well, as is typical with blogs, I lost all momentum as soon as I announced I was starting one. But I have good reasons for it! I started a new job and several volunteer positions, and have been working intensely on writing–just not blog writing. But now that I’m in the rhythm of things, I want to keep blogging periodically about what I’m learning, starting with a series about insights for writers from the POV of a newbie bookseller.

I started working at Big Name Bookstore (BN for short) recently, as a kind of market research project for which I also get paid 😉 Through this position, I’m getting to learn a bit about the business side of writing and about my (hopefully) future readers.

Already, a number of conversations and observations have shaken the way I think about writing and publishing–in an exciting way! I’d like to write a continuing series of posts, focusing particularly on the romance genre and market. For context, I kicked off this year venturing into the romance genre. My heart is with sci fi/fantasy/speculative fiction, but I wanted to step from writing-as-passion towards writing-as-profession, and I thought a good way to make this leap would be to apprentice in the bestselling genre, and a genre I know nothing about.

I might make another blog post about this topic itself, but after two months, I’m now about 10 chapters, 25,000 words into my first romance novel and having a blast. I do think it’s helped improve my writing to work in a genre I’m not as emotionally attached to, because that distance has allowed for a more objective appraisal of what the book is doing and what it needs to be doing to land with readers. I’m able to focus on technique in the detached, demystified way a beginning artist practices shading spheres and cones before trying to paint a portrait of someone they care about.

Learning to write romance while working at a bookstore with a bunch of romance readers and observing the activity and interests of romance reader customers has been a great learning experience, and I hope to share more lessons, anecdotes, and peculiar insights into the sales side of writing. For now, here’s a couple general observations:

Lesson 1: People still buy a lot of books. And people who buy books, buy a lot of books.

Before working here, I didn’t understand how bookstores are still in business, because I considered myself A Reader, yet hadn’t bought a new book in years (I’m a Libby and Half Price Books diehard). I assumed other people were like me, and no matter how much they love books, had a kneejerk reaction against buying anything brand new at full price. Or got everything off Amazon.

But as it turns out, I’m just a miserable skinflint and not representative of the general population. People buy tons of books. Young people, without as many financial expenses to budget for, spend allowances and first paychecks on books. Teenagers buy simple poetry that speaks to complicated feelings. Manga readers buy each new installation in series (serieses?) that span hundreds of installments. Christians buy Bibles and devotionals. Everyone buys self-help. And romance readers… buy every single romance book on the shelf.

What’s more, although I don’t know the actual numbers, I think there’s probably a statistic like 75% of everyday book sales (ie not counting holiday shopping) come from the same 30% of customers. People who buy books tend to be repeat customers. So it seems to me that if you work to know your readers, to inspire and loyally serve them what they love you for, they will follow you to the end of the earth. So I would think, if you want to make money, make readers.  

Lesson 2: Not all books are set up to succeed, but to every book there may be a season

Before working here, I assumed that if your book got traditionally published, actually put on a real shelf in a real bookstore, that meant you had made it. You’d been immortalized. Now I understand that a great number of important and wonderful books aren’t available at the bookstore—half the books I grew up on, which were fundamental for my development as a person and a writer, just aren’t here anymore. And many of the books that are here, won’t last, or get much out of it.

This starts with the publisher and proceeds down a train of people and practices that can help or hurt a book, and there’s a lot more to a book making it than just being on the shelf. Let’s compare two books, both alike in dignity, and yet one will go big and one will fade into ignominy:

Book one: This book a publishing house has decided to go all-in on marketing. We receive 10+ hardcover copies with expertly designed, eye-catching, rainbow-hued covers, and maybe sprayed edges. The publisher and BN make a deal to promote the book with special editions, signage, a display table, putting it on the book club/monthly recommendation list, etc. Books with 3 or more copies on the shelf, which will include these extra promoted books, get “faced out,” or turned to display the cover rather than the spine, which greatly increases the chance of their being picked up and purchased.

Book two: For whatever reason, the publisher doesn’t want to stake much on this one. They treat it as a throwaway title, one of a number of books they go ahead and try, but don’t expect to make a lot off of. We only receive a single, paperback copy. It won’t be on any eye-catching tables at the front of the store, on lists of must-reads and book club picks, and it won’t even get faced out. It is, in my personal opinion, just as good as Book One. But books are largely sold on everything but the actual writing inside. Right out the gate, this book has been condemned to sell poorly, and after the one copy sells, or hits a certain date, we won’t order any more.

This was an important lesson for me. On the business side of things, it stresses the significance of everything that isn’t writing to the profession of writing. The marketing, in a lot of these cases, is better than the book, and you can probably make more money through good marketing than good writing.

It’s also humbling, on the writer side of things. When you write alone in your room, you can start to dream up all kinds of self-aggrandizing visions; there’s nothing to check them. But when working at the bookstore, keeping vigil by the little books, the ones who have not sold a single copy in their years of sitting there, ushering them over the threshold of death when their time finally comes, you get reality checked. You think, damn, I’m much more likely to be one of these little guys than N.K. Jemisin or Brandon Sanderson.

But this isn’t discouraging. In fact, I find it comforting! I feel at home with the little guys [gender-neutral], I feel a kinship and camaraderie with them, and I can let go of that anxiety to punch above my weight. It’s taught me that you can be successful at whatever level you reach, especially if you study marketing and write to market.

And I see that the shelves are continually in flux, their ancient contents now eroded, and now shored up with new soil. How while this one little book may not last, for this month at least it sits where Ursula Le Guin used to sit! That this manga about a toilet holds the place once occupied by beautifully illustrated narratives like With the Light and Mushishi. It assures me that if I just keep learning and working, I can have my turn, and there is plenty of space and need for good books, and simply new books, even more than great books and immortal books.

I think acknowledging this doesn’t mean setting the bar low for yourself, but appreciating where you’re at along the journey, seeking opportunities appropriate to your level, and being mindful of the other factors that go into success besides the writing itself. 

Thanks for reading! Hope to check in again soon.

Reviews you can use: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer


First blog post, welcome!

I’m going to start by blogging edited-down versions of the analyses I write after reading stories, paired with writing exercises based on the book I’m reviewing, I call it “reviews you can use”!

As part of my writing practice, after finishing a book I go back over it and take notes on its plot, characters, structure, techniques, etc. With shorter stories, I will often construct a complete “template” based on the story’s beats and unique quirks, then write a story using this template. These blog posts will pass on templates and exercises I’ve come up with, which I hope you’ll find fun and useful too.

They will contain spoilers and may not make as much sense if you haven’t read the book yourself, but I hope you will find the writing exercises fun and helpful either way (scroll to the end for these), and that sharing these examples of how I analyze a text may also be useful in your own approach to breaking down a story.

Analysis: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer


Warning: Spoilers!

Summary

Rachel, a scavenger in the nightmarish apocalyptic “City,” where biotech creatures engineered by “the Company” have taken over, finds Borne, a mysterious creature. It begins to rapidly grow and change, and she becomes a kind of mother to him, with all the love and heartbreak that entails. The story engages themes of not just motherhood, but personhood, as well as love and trauma, nature and nurture, destruction and evolution.

You can’t shake the feeling you’re reading Alice and Wonderland, but a version VanderMeer altered so much along the way that it’s a totally different story– only some vestigial Alice and Wonderland vibe continues to haunt your reading, like Rachel points out the reader yourself haunts her story. The Red Queen has been recast as the Magician, Wick whom Rachel pursues in their “warren” home is the White Rabbit, Mord is the Cheshire Cat, and most tellingly at the end of the story we learn that Rachel quite literally came here through a looking glass.

The narrator – the key to why this story works (for me)

The story’s world is so (darkly) whimsical and surreal, it almost turned me off, because absurdist stories are not so much to my taste. It takes a few chapters to get your bearings, you feel like Rachel when she looks at Borne’s shapeshifting colors and considers that her eyes didn’t evolve to be able to see anything like this.

But I was quickly anchored by the real-world-ness of the narrator Rachel, and kept grounded throughout as much by her presence as by her own grappling with the world. Through Rachel, I was able to appreciate the world as a metaphor for the psyche, and its chaos as a metaphor for trauma and growth, in a way I’m not able to appreciate Alice in Wonderland. Rachel is completely human and relatable, and she’s in charge of the story, so despite the madness going on around her, we’re able to stay sane through her and her ordering of the world for us via her narration and her actions in it. It also helps Rachel feel so real as a character because she makes us real to her– she serves to give a sense of meaning to many people’s lives in the story despite the chaos (both external and existential), including us readers.

I just started reading VanderMeer’s Annihilation since it was turned into one of my favorite movies, and it’s interesting in both books there’s a reason we’re receiving this story, here it’s Rachel achieving her dream of writing a book, there it’s the Biologist completing her requisite journal entries during their voyage into the mysterious Area X.

Dialogue

The dialogue is super fun and tightly woven into the activity of each scene. VanderMeer delightfully captures not only how kids talk, but how this particular type of kid would talk, who is not human and is growing up in 5 directions instead of 1. In the acknowledgments, VanderMeer thanks stepdaughter Erin Kennedy and grandson “Mr. R” Riley for help with this dialogue. That’s a good cue to seek advice and assistance in the writing process, and in particular go out and study and inquire from the type of voices you’re trying to emulate.

A flaw; there were a couple parts where Wick’s dialogue didn’t sound like him, but more like Borne. This was confusing because sometimes, Wick sounding like Borne was intentional foreshadowing that he WAS Borne pretending to be Wick. But there were one or two parts where he was definitely Wick but still sounded like Borne. Maybe this was to foreshadow that since Wick was also non-human, he occasionally had his idiosyncrasies. But it took me out of the story at these moments because it didn’t sound authentic to his character and felt like a fumble where VanderMeer got used to writing as Borne so the “Borne voice” leaked into Wick voice.

Storytelling theme and narrative devices

There’s a strong theme of storytelling within the story, and VanderMeer also employs various devices to spice up the one running narrative by Rachel, like injecting journal entries, uncovered secret files, flashbacks, and a letter. Rachel herself wanted to be a writer, and her relationship with Borne, especially in its first stage, really develops through her continuously telling stories to him, even before she realizes he can understand her. She also, obviously, tells us this story, fulfilling her dream of being a writer. Rachel’s partner, Wick, designs drugs which can erase your memories and/or insert new ones– he too is a kind of storyteller, or inverse storyteller, untelling people their life stories. Borne himself is like a walking library of stories, since he remembers the life of every creature he “knows” (eats, kind of). We don’t get to know all the stories he knows, but VanderMeer probably wrote them out as worldbuilding, because you get glimpses into their existence based on things Borne says and does.

Significant names

You can’t do this with every type of story, but I find it fun when names have literal or significant meanings, and Borne, in all its weirdness, gets to run with this. All the names in this story seem to have significance, although only some are explained.

Rachel is the only person with a normal name (which tracks with her being the Alice who’s not from this world), explained as a name she was given because it didn’t run on either side of her family, a compromise between her Romeo and Juliet-esque parents. In the Bible, the original Rachel is an important matriarch whose relationship to motherhood is also complex and traumatic, interwoven with infertility, betrayal, and surrogacy. One could draw many parallels between the biblical story of Rachel and the story here –they both raise someone else’s child who appears to be a kind of divine intervention, they are both “discovered” by their partners beside pools of water, etc.–, but I won’t belabor (no pun intended) the point.

Rachel named “Borne” after a play on words her partner once made about being born/borne. Borne’s name gains added significance as a creature who is borne (carried, and carried to term) first by Mord, then by Rachel, and by whom others are borne, since his nature is to incorporate the material and information around him into his body.

VanderMeer’s own name indicates Dutch heritage, and in Dutch “moord” means “murder,” a fitting name for the embodiment of destruction that is Mord. (Also interesting, “VanderMeer” means “From the Lake” and many creatures in this story come from watery places).

“Wick” is more ambiguous, but my theory is that there’s an off-stage story behind this, that Wick was originally designed as a bioluminescent creature, and this is a candle metaphor –at certain points Rachel dramatically describes him as radiant with light, especially when his love for her is fully revealed in his acts towards the end of the story. The way she describes this can be read as metaphor, but looking back he may actually have a luminescent quality which Rachel was consciously or subconsciously picking up on.

An incomplete picture and keeping some mysteries

VanderMeer delivers on the big promises, but introduces plenty of mystery that doesn’t get answered, in a way that you won’t feel disappointed because you got the answers to the biggest questions, but which serve as further hooks to keep you engaged. Some examples:

  • What is Borne? We are given enough angles to form our own understanding of Borne, but a definitive answer is never given — we’re satisfied with this because we realize it’s asking the wrong question, or rather, this is the ultimate question of all creatures, and does not have a definitive answer– existentialism etc.
  • What’s up with the Company and the City? We get to know them fairly well, but at the end of the book there’s no definitive history given of where either came from and how they got to the state they’re in today, aside from the general understanding of human failings, capitalism, and climate crisis leading to apocalypse.
  • Who is Mord? — unlike Borne, we get a more definitive answer to “what” Mord is, but not who. We learn he was initially a human being who turned into a creature, but not who that human was. I was expecting to learn more about who was before, especially the way Wick talked about him sometimes I thought they might have been in a relationship. But I guess the interesting thing here is that, Mord is human who becomes a creature, who is he is what he is now, like everyone else.

Personhood

This is one of the two top themes of the book in my opinion, beside motherhood. “Am I a person?” “What does it mean to be a person” etc. are questions regularly asked directly by characters, or raised in the readers’ mind as the story unfolds.

The contrasts between characters and their relation to personhood allow for a holistic contemplation of personhood and humanity. We see each character as one thing and then learn they “are,” or were, something else entirely. For example, we see Wick as human for most of the story, but he doesn’t see himself that way. Later we learn that Wick is a creature we mistook for human. But he does become human, after self-sabotaging his own personhood for so long through self-loathing, love of Rachel, and hatred of Borne.

Within this theme arises the question of nature versus nurture, or the big impact both have. On the one hand, Mord is a human who is transformed into a creature through the Company’s evil surgery –nurture over nature. On the other hand, Borne is a creature who is transformed into a person through Rachel’s love, but also through an inner light or nature which understands himself in a subconscious way to be deserving of more love and personhood than even Rachel gives him –nurture, but wait! More deeply, nature.

Rachel is the only one who actually doesn’t change that much, now that I think about it, despite being the ostensible protagonist as the narrator (though Borne is really the protagonist imo). Or at least the change with Rachel is more subtle. At the beginning, the trauma was so great that she doesn’t know how she got here, she has a broken relationship with her beloved, and she’s also given up her dream of being a writer. At the end, she learns what happened to her parents, that their great act of love seeking a better life for her got them killed and brought her here, she has a complete and healed relationship with her beloved, and she has apparently written this story. She’s been able to heal and self-actualize even in what we initially considered apocalypse, she’s found new life at the end of the world.

Some other thoughts on personhood/character development

  • Borne’s dressing up as a wizard to disguise himself was the most adorable thing and made me just fall in love with him as a character. And as a shapeshifting creature that can look like anything and beyond, the choices he makes or feels he has to make about what he looks like serve as meditations on children trying to please parents, people trying to please societal norms, etc.
  • The horror of when Rachel, after obviously loving Borne as her child, completely neglects to check up on his wounds after asking him to defend her with his life, was one of the most shattering moments of the book for me. The mother using the child as a human shield and then just absentmindedly forgetting to even check up on the wounds he incurred in protecting her was brutal, it revealed in a way she doesn’t see him as a person like she sees her own kind (even ironically when the other human turns out to be not human at all). In this case, Borne is more human, or at least a better person, than Rachel. This was a key scene for interrogating who is really “human” or “person.”


Mixed feelings about the ending

The very last lines, in which we learn that Borne survived in a way, but that Rachel will kill him if he shows any sign of personhood, didn’t sit right with me. His survival felt a little deus ex machina, and Rachel’s reaction felt like VanderMeer delivering a moral to the story that I didn’t realize he was pushing, and which I highly disagreed with. For most of the read, I thought the book was gonna end with Borne devouring everything and this turning out to be a good thing because he’s a kind of preserving, healing, synthesizing force that becomes a new world in itself. So for Rachel to conclude it’s right to kill Borne felt all kinds of wrong.

But reflecting further, I can also see this as a masterful ending. Because remember, Rachel is telling us this story, not VanderMeer. Rachel’s conclusion is at the end of the day, Borne’s nature is a killing machine, so he needs to be killed before he can kill. But VanderMeer’s conclusion, is to have us interrogate this, Rachel’s conclusion, and apply the same logic to her: maybe humans are a killing machine that can be kept around in a future run by more evolved creatures only if we’re “nice” (one of the story’s motif words), but we may just to be eliminated if it seems we’re doomed by nature to be a killing machine.

This ending states that humans kind of suck and can’t think beyond certain limits, and Rachel will never be able to really outgrow her limited morality in this regard. But just like the book earlier wondered, “you wouldn’t hate a wolf for hunting, that’s its nature,” maybe in ending on this disappointing note with Rachel, it’s inviting us to consider that we shouldn’t hate humans for the apparent evils we’ve done either. It’s our nature, just like a wolf can’t choose to be vegetarian, we’re stuck thinking in terms of killing or being killed. Or maybe we’re like Borne, and may have [been] developed to be a killing machine, but can choose to be good, in the right conditions.

Either way, the ending seems to point to the City’s salvation via the creatures that succeed humans, who aren’t just better because they try to be better, as we try but fail to overcome our nature, but are better because they have better natures to begin with (a sort of Aristotelian ethics). Evidence for this interpretation comes in the angelic figure of the fox, who moves through the world (literally, through solid matter), accompanying its dying creatures in love, without yielding to them or harming them, on its way to building a world beyond them. I think this is an interesting form of climate optimism championed by VanderMeer, that humans may wreck and irrevocably alter the earth, and go extinct, but the earth will not end, and life will continue to evolve and improve.

Writing exercises based on Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

  1. Practice writing child dialogue. Take notes as you listen to kids you know, or lookup youtube videos of kids speaking, analyze its sense and syntax, get inspired by its quirks, and then try writing your own.
  2. Descriptive chapter headings. Outline or organize a story via descriptive chapter headings, like Borne is structured. For example, “What Wick had told me about the fish project and the company,” “What I found and how I found it,” etc. The novel Cracks uses this device as well, often in the form of questions, which the chapter answers: “Why did our parents send us to this school?”, “How we first heard about Fiamma.” Posing a question about the story as a chapter heading at then writing to answer the question can be a good way to brainstorm material as well as retain as a narrative device in the final draft.
  3. Collage. Embellish or shake up your story by telling part of it through a journal entry, letter between characters, or flashback. For practice, try delivering the same content through all three different vehicles.
  4. Who’s your narrator and why do they write? Write in the first person as if this is a real story you’re passing on, and consider in what manner it would have been written down and delivered, to whom, and why.
  5. Write from nature. VanderMeer’s books attest to his growing up in, studying, and loving complex ecosystems. Spend time studying, actually studying, the flora and fauna of the place where you live. You can use apps like iNaturalist or PlantNet that allow you to snap pictures and quickly learn about what you’re looking at. Use this knowledge to enrich your worldbuilding and/or write an apocalyptic story based in your backyard and how the creatures you find there might evolve.