Monstrous Beauty Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

An illustration from Honor C. Appleton's The Little Mermaid, as reprinted in the Wall Street Journal

I was surprised (and delighted) to discover that Meghan Cox Gurdon had reviewed most of the summer's mermaid books in The Wall Street Journal on Friday. I may be one of the only—the only?—young-adult authors with an actual subscription to the WSJ.

Ms. Gurdon is famous in the YA community for having written an article in June, 2011 about how dark YA books have gotten, and Monstrous Beauty is nothing if not dark, so I held my breath as I read her summary, but she got it just right:

Teen readers will have to wait until later this year for two of the most compelling (and gory) mermaid offerings....Elizabeth Fama's "Monstrous Beauty" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 295 pages, $17.99), also due out this summer, is by far the most sophisticated but also the most mature in its treatment of the consuming loves and violent deaths wrought by mer-folk. The story begins in 1522 when the mermaid Syrenka accidentally murders her mortal beloved. Three centuries later, she renounces her fins and tail for the love of another human man, but the exchange comes at a terrible price. Nor does her transformation go unnoticed: A local woman's suspicion of Syrenka leads to a scene of Grand Guignol that will send ghastly effects down to the present day and into the life of a teenager named Hester.

My friend Karyn Silverman pointed out that"sophisticated but mature" is a bit of a contradiction, unless you interpret "sophisticated" to be "good" and "mature" to be code for "sex and violence." I think that's undoubtedly what Ms. Gurdon meant, but both words are apt. And nothing makes me happier than hearing the pivotal historical scene in the book described as a Grand Guignol. WIN.

It's a swell review, and I'm grateful. It also tickles me to no end to see my name, rather than my husband's or my dad's, in the WSJ.

Two Snapshots

I don't have a post this week because I'm on deadline, writing a short story for Tor.com. But I do have this nice photo of my kitchen backsplash tile, which we installed almost twenty years ago, when publishing kids' books was just a gleam in my eye:

Yup, that's Higglety Pigglety Pop, Starring Miss Jennie As The Dog. The whole book fits perfectly, wrapping around my cooking station. I had the tiles custom silk-screened by a ceramic artist in Santa Monica. I could barely stand to read or watch Mr. Sendak's interviews, don't get me started on that grouchy Luddite (God rest his soul, as my grandmother would say), but darn it if I don't wholly respect his work.

And here's a photo of the first batch of lettuce that I've just picked from my beloved neighbor's yard. He's the most talented, nerdy urban gardener in Chicago, in addition to being the founder and retired CEO of a bank that specialized in making loans to poor South Side businesses, which sort of shows neatly what living in the neighborhood of the University of Chicago is like.

Looking back at my Flickr account, I see that I've taken a photo of my first batch of Ron's lettuce every single spring, as if it were the first time. This is because it never gets old: the hope of a new growing season, the first evidence of an impending summer, the joy of having made it through the winter. God, I love Chicago. 

HBO and Book Piracy: Random Thoughts

How often are books pirated? I don't know the answer to that. I think physical books are rarely pirated, unless you count loaning your favorite book to several friends "piracy." E-books are probably pirated more often, but again, it's not my impression that it represents massive losses in sales. Perhaps there's not much of a problem because digital books are relatively cheap to buy and are usually readily available: if you want to buy one, you can. If you'd rather steal it, you probably don't represent a lost sale because you never would have bought it anyway. With physical books and e-books you get exactly what you pay for: one book, a book you wanted.

I recently heard that Game of Thrones has the honor of being the most-pirated TV show on cable. In general, I don't like "stealing" anything, but in this case I'm going to blame the victim. There are only two ways to buy that program legally: you can sign up for HBO—which also requires you to buy a buy a basic cable package if you don't already have it (my family, for instance, does not have cable); or you can buy it one episode at a time through iTunes, but very belatedly, which will keep you out of the "buzz" loop. Also, iTunes charges $3.99 per episode, which means by the time you've watched a season, you've paid more for it than buying the box set when it's released. And I'm pretty sure (although I'd have to check on this) the iTunes GoT episodes have DNR protection on them, which means that they can't be loaded to a thumb drive, and they end up dying with whatever computer you download them to.

This is clearly a marketing mistake. Customers should be able to buy GoT alone, by itself, the way you can buy one book. Not for any sort of ethical reason but for an economic one: HBO is missing an entire market segment. They're missing casual TV watchers who want only one of their products. And since GoT is already streamed online by HBO (via HBO GO) for its subscribers (thus the technological hurdle is crossed), it makes no sense that they shouldn't allow non-HBO subscribers to purchase individual episodes the day after they're aired, or get an online "Game of Thrones Season Pass." Another creative marketing alternative would be to say that if you buy all 10 episodes via iTunes, you're entitled to the DVD set at the end (which you've effectively already bought), and then release the iTunes episodes in a more timely fashion. Or they could allow cable subscribers to turn their subscription on and off by the season. There are dozens of creative solutions waiting out there.

The current model—making customers buy HBO so that they can watch one show—is the book publishing equivalent of Farrar, Straus and Giroux telling their customers, "You can't buy Monstrous Beauty alone, but you can buy every hardcover of the entire fall 2012 season in order to read it." Don't like that deal?  "Fine! You can buy it unbundled from the rest of the season when it comes out in paperback, and every other reader has moved on."

Honestly, Game of Thrones appeals to a generation of people who've purchased their music collection one song at a time. Someone at HBO is a dinosaur.

Finally, I believe that trying to solve the problem of piracy through legislation and harsh enforcement is a mistake. It's something studios and video game companies (and maybe even publishers) want, but it's short-sighted, for a couple of reasons. First, the solutions should come from creative marketing and technological innovations, which can only happen if there's pressure to develop those solutions; and second, a certain amount of free access to content actually spurs more purchases through word-of-mouth advertising, and somehow that power should be harnessed rather than quashed.

Cover Disasters #2: If It Ain't Broke...

It's true. I'm obsessed with covers. It's a serious business, though, and merits our attention.

But first let me say that I don't want to offend Jackson Pearce, my talented colleague (who is happy with her cover re-boot, and that's really important), or Little, Brown, a notoriously fine publisher.

It may not even be fair to call this cover story a disaster, although from a purely artistic standpoint, I believe it is. And from the standpoint of employing illustrators, it is. And from the standpoint of my personal preferences...well, it is.

Jackson Pearce has a clever series of "Fairytale Retellings" for the young-adult market. The first is Sisters Red, a Little Red Riding story but with two teen sisters and some kick-ass werewolf hunting. The second is Sweetly, an updated version of Hansel and Gretel set in South Carolina, and the third, due on September 4th, will be Fathomless, a Little Mermaid retelling.

The hardcovers for the first two books were (oh, swoon!) illustrated. Now if you know me, you know I'm on the warpath about how we need more illustrated covers, and LOOK HOW AWESOME these are:

Knocked out of the ballpark.

I love the way the wolf's head is hidden under the sisters, and the way the witch's face is hidden in the trees, and the striking solid red and dusky iris-blue. I love the Mike-Mignola-esque bold ink style. I would have loved to have seen how the illustrator handled the mermaid in Fathomless (and I'm thinking the color scheme would have been...sea green?). But Little Brown has decided not to keep this design concept for the third book, even though it's not only powerful and individual, it's also ideally suited to depicting cool mermaids. Instead, Fathomless will have this hardcover:

Ho hum. A mermaid necklace.

And the paperbacks of the first two books will be revamped to match this generic, mainstream style. The paperback cover of Sweetly will now look like this:

Do you know how many books with key-covers there are?
Incarceron, anyone? Bitterblue?

(The paperback cover for Sisters Red hasn't been released yet.)

If I had to guess, I'd say that the publisher worried that the original designs seemed too middle-grade, especially given that there are competing YA fairytale retellings now, like Marissa Meyer's Cinder (which I might point out has an illustrated dust jacket, but oh, well) and they wanted to make sure the cover screamed "TEEN!"—which nowadays unfortunately translates into "DIGITALLY MANIPULATED PHOTO!" When will we trust that teens have just as much artistic taste as adults? When will we stop treating them like they're a different species?

I think Little, Brown has made the mistake that many publishers are making lately: using benign photographic covers to "signal" that a book is YA, sacrificing art and originality in the process. In my opinion Jackson Pearce's old covers stood out from the crowd and were timeless. Three of them would have made a lovely package together.