Voices that don’t matter all that much

This post is primarily intended for authors, and those who intend to become authors, especially if your area of interest is broadly technological. It’s about choosing a publisher wisely — or, more to the point, about the perils of not doing so.

As many of you know, in 2005 I started framing out the book that would eventually see the light of day as Everyware. As a first-time author with no track record, proposing a speculative work on what was then still very much an emergent area of practice, I assumed that there would be, at best, limited publisher interest in my pitch. So I settled for the first one willing to invest in my proposal, the New Riders imprint of Berkeley-based technology house Peachpit Press. (You should know that Peachpit is itself a subsidiary of the SOPA-supporting Pearson Education, but that’s a story for a different day.)

In retrospect I clearly could and should have held out for not merely a different publisher, but a different kind of publisher. New Riders has never had the foggiest idea what to do with Everyware, from the original editor they assigned to the book — a mommyblogger! — to this entirely-serious proposal for the cover to the slapdash way they handled converting the book into an electronic format.

A lot of this, in naked point of fact, is nobody’s fault but my own. I chose poorly. That’s all on me, and properly so; consider me chastened by the experience.

But New Riders continues to have responsibility for Everyware, and they continue to serve it poorly, in ways that undermine its chances of making money for them. There’s absolutely no excuse for this kind of thing. What’s that? That is how Everyware shows up on Readmill, an exciting new social-reading application. That’s how your book would show up on Readmill, too, if you entrusted its publication to New Riders.

You see the way there’s no cover image for the book, like there is for every other book on the service? You see the way Readmill thinks “Mobipocket” is part of the book’s title? These artifacts are not Readmill’s fault. Nor are they Amazon‘s, or any other vendor’s. They’re part and parcel of the way the publisher has hamfistedly treated the digital edition: as an afterthought, as something not even worth the few minutes’ effort fixing these blunders would have required.

None of this might have mattered, particularly, in the days when digital books were niche propositions. But given Everyware‘s subject and target audience, I have to imagine that the overwhelming majority of people who’d be interested in the book in the first place would be inclined to engage it digitally. Wouldn’t it make sense to treat these people — these paying customers — not like second-class citizens, but like the valued, appreciated readers they are?

Like I say, I’ve learned my lesson. But if there are any among you who are contemplating authorship, please try to profit from my mistakes. Seek a publisher who understands and will support your work — and, just as importantly, who displays some capability and intention of investing in you. If you can’t find a publisher who meets this description, better you launch your title yourself. You have Kickstarter, you have Amazon, you have a ton of great tools and distribution channels that didn’t exist or weren’t fully robust even a year ago.

Trust me on this. New Riders may well be a poster child for everything that’s wrong with the publishing industry, but they’re not alone. If you believe in your ideas and have invested effort and craft in expressing those ideas in the form of a book, you deserve better…and so does your book.

My back pages: What is Hotel?

Originally published 12 September 2006 on my old v-2.org site, this remains one of my most-requested pieces, and I’m embarrassed it’s taken me so long to get it back up. There are one or two odd resonances in these post-DSK days, but for the most part it retains its power. Do enjoy it.

I had wanted to do some thinking about why I so often prefer to stay in a hotel room when travelling – even to cities where I have many friends with room to spare, and even when I can’t really afford it. I want to clarify, for myself if no one else, just what it is that I am looking for, and why I so often find myself disappointed.

I think we can take it as read that Hotel is more than a place to stash one’s body and personal effects while on the road; otherwise the capsule hotel, priced appropriately to its dimensions, would have more than curiosity appeal.

But I’m also assuming that the proposition goes quite a bit further, even, than the evoking the space of home in unfamiliar surroundings. In many regards, I’m imagining, it is precisely the condition of home that Hotel aims to transcend. (Witness the curious reimportation into the domestic milieu of “hotel-grade” mattresses, linen, bath appointments, and so on.)

The element of reinvention is certainly at play here, the opportunity to try on new masks and guises that has always been afforded by travel. But there is also a potent set of inducements operating at the rawly material level:

- Hotel is always clean[ed], even sterile. Hotel is always a blank slate, an idealized terrain not subject to the cluttering accumulations and biological drifts of everyday life. Designed to be serviced, it holds forth the promise of a new beginning with every passing day, “sanitized for your protection.”

- Nested somewhere within the idea of Hotel is that of Concierge, of some human guide to the social, physical and temporal complexity that is city. Bundled up in the Concierge pattern are notions of access and privilege: they can get you reservations or tickets that are otherwise impossible to acquire, accomodate and smooth transactions that would otherwise require extensive nemawashi.

The prime attribute sought here is that of discretion: the Concierge arranges, but never judges. Or so I’d want to believe – never having actually availed myself of concierge services anywhere, the access symbolized by those golden keys remains a potent fantasy for me. The reality (i.e. “good” seats at tonight’s showing of The Lion King) is probably a great deal sadder and less romantic.

- Hotel is always perched precisely on the borderline between public and private. Once you close the door of your room, it’s as if you’ve decoupled utterly from the world and its demands – until the moment that you require something from beyond its walls. In the ideal case (that generally suggested by ads, brochures, and other marketing collateral), the guest finds that sustenance of most any sort is merely a phonecall away. This unusual ability to toggle at whim between public and private, detached and intensely connected, constitutes one of the primary attractions of Hotel.

- Hotel is a stage set on which the guest is free to act and enact some idealized version of his or her self and life. Room and public areas invoke a certain insouciance or lightness of spirit; the all-important element of glamour is provided by the furnishings, the location, the design, and never least by the spectral presence of other guests historic or contemporary.

- Hotel is a realm where you are unusually free to act without (apparent) consequence and where, to a great degree, you simply needn’t consider anyone else’s prerogatives in making your own choices. You come and go as you please; you act as you and you alone see fit; you emit whatever noises, smells and traces you will.

And here, of course, is where a significant element of bad faith surfaces, because unless you are unusually callous – and I like to think that I am not – the guest always retains the consciousness that someone has to clean it all up. And by the same token, that that someone is building up an impression of the guest based on their leavings. Of course, to put it with maximum bluntness, such perceptions have historically been safe because the people holding them do not matter to the guest, socially, economically, or otherwise. Suppression of one’s consciousness regarding all of this is a sleight-of-hand absolutely necessary to enjoyment of the Hotel condition.

- At its best, Hotel is always both prospect and refuge, offering (in its public spaces at the very least) a view from the commanding heights matched only by the security with which the guest retreats from others’ gaze.

- Ideally, Hotel is near-clockless, time here reduced to the shifting of the offshore breeze…the daily lighting of the lanterns…the setting-out of the breakfast buffet.

- There is always in Hotel a note of the louche, even in the most elegant surroundings and however subterranean. For me, anyway, Hotel is always an intensely erotic machine, a potent cocktail of privacy, disinhibition, borrowed glamour and relative anonymity. Much of the pleasure of Hotel living ultimately resolves to what it promises the guest in the exercise of their sexuality. The best Hotels understand and acknowledge this, but don’t beat you over the head with it.

Following on from this is a specific geometry which has always been all but irrelevant to me personally, but which presumably furnishes much of the attraction of Hotel for a great many: backstairs sexual intrigues of guest and uniformed staff, fueled by the power and economic differentials between the participants just as a tornado is fueled by stark gradients of heat and humidity. You can’t convince me that the desk staff at the Standard or the W aren’t hired with this in mind, or don’t consider it in applying for work there.

- And this brings me, finally, to the question of why I so rarely find these elements held in just the right balance. (I discount, with sad ease, nine of ten nights spent on the road, in hostelries variously too corporate, too generic or tone-deaf or self-consciously swank to enjoy.)

Some simply try too hard, throwing every conceivable vista, gadget and obsequious gesture at the Guest in the hope of securing acquiescence to the particular paradigm of luxury on offer. But excess for its own sake isn’t really the point of Hotel, at least as far as I am concerned, unless you mean the deeper and truer privileges of abundant time and space and air.

Even when the level of material luxury has been gauged properly, some – many – get its tenor all wrong. For Hotel to work for me at all, it can’t smother the Guest with wet “glamour” of the Versace/Trump/Cristal variety, or anything even remotely close. I’m not asking for an ashram, but to err on the side of astringency is frankly preferable. Too rustic, too winking, too bustling, too efficient: easy pitfalls to stumble into, and terribly hard to recover from.

Ultimately, I think, it’s the quality of modulated privacy that determines whether Hotel is experienced as restorative or as something to be endured. A lodging can fail on every other aesthetic and practical ground and still succeed, in my book, if only it lets the Guest establish a temporary base of operations that transitions rapidly and readily between sanctuary and conviviality.

Happily, of course, some do far better at resolving these challenges. Even the big chains occasionally demonstrate an understanding of real comfort. And once in a blue moon, someone gets almost everything right.