Merry Christmas To You

David Barringer, Part 5

Stat Box:

Birthdate/Birthplace: September 6, 1969 - Chicago
Family: Married with 2 Children; 2 brothers
Favorite TV Shows/Films/Music: The Wire/Robin Williams Live/Smashing Pumpkins
Favorite Food: Homemade Bread
Favorite Drink: Coffee a.m., Banana Smoothie noon, Bell's Oberon p.m.
Favorite Place to Vacation: Island Beach
Dream Car: Jetpack
Favorite Cereal: Homemade Cranberry Granola with Pistacios
If I Wasn't A Designer/Writer I'd Be: a manic-depressive.
Best Advice I Ever Received: If I did not achieve great things, I died in their pursuit.
And the Worst: Make sure you have a career to fall back on.
Five Items In My Glove Compartment Right Now: Leatherman, random CDs, tire gauge, crumpled Google Map printout, car guide.
I'd Make A Great James Bond because: I wear suits well, and I'm taller than any supermodel.
My Idea Of Sexy: there's that moment when two people know it's go time, there's no um, ah, well, if, but, maybe--it's just yes and now. It can be long and slow like a sea expedition or quick and intense like sprinting in place. But it's that connection that seals off the rest of the world and turns solo lust into a sexy duet.
Mac or PC? Originally Mac from IIc to Powerbook, now PC because of work.
Leno or Letterman? Jon Stewart.
Paper or plastic? Plastic. I have a dog.

For more on David, check out his web site and buy his books!

David Barringer, Part 4

What have you learned from design that helps and improves your writing, and vice versa?

This is going to sound odd, but almost nothing in one can "improve" how well you do in the other. Design has helped me appreciate how hard it is to typeset text, to lay out a magazine, to make a book from start to finish. But I think learning an appreciation is about where it ends. I know that good typesetting can make poor writing look good but still read poorly. Thinking about how my writing is going to look on the page can often hijack the writing process, distracting me into thinking about the design of the whole book before I've written a single chapter. But in certain projects, I have been able to combine the disciplines into a single effort, envisioning the design and writing as part of, more or less, one idea. The Dead Bug Funeral Kit is a good example. I had the idea. Then I looked over all the ways I could construct the kit, meaning I thought first about the design of it. Then when I had the kit done, I worked backwards from the end result to fit the writing into it. I wrote the poems a certain length to fit the page. I wrote instructions that could fit on a scroll. I designed labels that would look good with the limited means at my disposal. That's a good example of design and writing combining within a single project and reinforcing each other so that the whole is greater than the parts. Magazine design is another area where I might be able to say that design and writing reinforce each other and lead to better results, but only when I'm able to both write and design and conceive of them together. In most other areas, I improve my writing only by reimagining and rewriting, not by designing and redesigning.

The vice versa (whether writing has improved my design) probably deserves the same answer. I have a respect for words when thinking about design, I know how you can so easily affect the interpretation simply by adjusting the design of the words, and I might use text differently within a design because I'm a writer. For example, I wrote a short story to fit on a bookmark. This is something a writer is more likely to do. But whether being a writer improves my design is a separate question. I think my love for writing influences my designs, but I also think I'm as likely to screw up a design because I'm a writer than I am to design better.

David Barringer, Part 3

Who are your favorite writers?

1. Arthur Rex, Little Big Man - Thomas Berger
2. Gargantua & Pantagruel - Rabelais
3. The collected prose of Jorge Luis Borges
4. A Woman of Independent Means - Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
5. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
6. The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
7. Anything by Donald Barthelme
8. Samuel Butler's Notebook
9. Ego 9 - James Agate
10. The recent books by David Markson
11. Jesus' Son- Denis Johnson
12. The Ice at the Bottom of the World - Mark Richards
13. A Relative Stranger - Charles Baxter
14. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
15. The collected works of Grace Paley
16. Thank You for Not Reading - Dubravka Ugresic
17. Anything by Amy Hempel
18. Eureka Street - Robert McLiam Wilson
19. We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
20. Mystery & Manners - Flannery O'Connor
21. Anything by David Foster Wallace
22. Big Bad Love - Larry Brown
23. Chimera - John Barth
24. Et tu, Babe - Mark Leyner
25. Bats out of Hell - Barry Hannah
26. Mao II - Don DeLillo
27. The Tunnel - Russell Edson
28. All Things, All At Once - Lee K. Abbot
29. Stop-Time - Frank Conroy
30. Devil in the White City - Erik Larson
31. The Satyricon - Petronius
32. The Kama Sutra
33. Emily Dickinson
34. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
35. The Death of Picasso - Guy Davenport
36. Requiem - Curtis White
37. Axel's Castle - Edmund Wilson
38. The Waste Books - Lichtenberg
39. Anything by Nietzsche
40. Chekhov
41. From Dawn to Decadence - Jacques Barzun
42. Anything by Lewis Lapham
43. The Mind at Night - Andrea Rock
44. Primate's Memoir - Robert Sapolsky
45. I Want To Spend The Rest Of My Life Everywhere... - Damien Hirst
46. Beautiful Evidence - Edward Tufte
47. On Being Free - Frithjof Bergmann
48. Anything by George Saunders
49. Catch-22 - Heller
50. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
51. 100 Years of Solitude - Marquez
52. Anything by E.B. White
53. Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Robert Olen Butler
54. Short fiction, Oscar Wilde

David Barringer: Part 2

What do you think of Print On Demand? While I understand the business reasons why someone wouldn't want to do it (bookstores won't carry POD books, publishers don't look at POD books as "real" books,etc), it's also a very easy, cheap way to get your stuff into print. Do you look at POD the same as traditional self-publishing, or does that POD label automatically mark it as something else?

Because of digital technology and a changing publishing industry, I think we can expect to see a lot of hybrid stuff going on well into the future. Barnes & Noble publishes their own imprint of classic works now. What's that? Self-publishing? I don't know. There are press shops now that operate both sheetfed and digital presses. For runs under 1,000, you can use a digital press, no matter what kind of publisher you are. And if the book sells, then you print another 1,000. And so on. Is that on-demand? I think the future of digital-press technology will continue to blur the boundaries between self-publishing and on-demand publishing and short-run printing and all that. I'll give you a rundown of my experience.

XLIBRIS. I used them in 2000 to print my first collection of stories. This was self-publishing and therefore limited to a kind of self-promotion. I hoped I would at least make back my investment, but that didn't happen. Xlibris designs and lays out the book for you, and it's really user friendly. But they charge way too much for an individual author to recoup their investment. Their books are priced too high compared to other titles. And somehow my Xlibris book kept appearing on Alibris, a used-book online seller, at a fraction of the cost of the original book; I bought a few of these and confirmed my suspicions that these were new, not used, books: not cool. I now cannot recommend them to anyone for any reason. I even pulled my book off Xlibris completely, and it's now out of print.

BOOKSURGE. For my second collection of stories, I went with a very small press, and they let me do my own design and typesetting and I even set up the whole thing through Booksurge. Much cheaper and still fun, but also something I did for the lark of it. I made no money on it. I never used them again, and I can't recommend it. One thing I did differently with this book is that I tried to get into bookstores on consignment. This was possible because I had a small press publish it, and so, while it was POD, I could still shelve a few copies with indie bookstores. I sold a hundred or so. Most were shipped back to me. Some bookstores I never followed up with. The transaction costs of consignment with indie bookstores are simply too great. It costs too much to print the book, make the calls, fill out the forms, ship the books, and then either split the cost 60/40 with the bookstore or pay for the return shipping of the books. In many cases, I just let the bookstore keep the books. It wasn't worth the cost to get them back. I was essentially paying to sell my books. Bad news.

CHAPBOOKS. For two of my fiction/graphic-art collections, I worked with two small presses to produce chapbooks. Chapbooks are usually 100 pages or less. They are printed out on someone's desktop printer, folded and bound by hand. Covers may be printed in short runs on a digital press (I did this with my collection We Were Ugly So We Made Beautiful Things, the cover of which was designed by Eduardo Recife of misprintedtype.com). These are another kind of hybrid, made possible by stubborn and creative individuals with personal computers, layout software, and spare change, simpatico with the zine ethic. In this manner, you can control your expenses and earn a little cash by placing your chapbooks with a few select bookstores and, most importantly, by selling them online. We Were Ugly still sells decently well online and in bookstores, according to Word Riot Press. As a designer, I can also heartily recommend this approach because you retain all control and you are very much forced to get down and dirty working hands-on and trying to be imaginative with a small to nonexistent budget. I still make by hand my books of eulogies for the Dead Bug Funeral Kit. I had to get very creative with the production of that book, and I still enjoy making them.

LULU. The new kids on the block of POD are places like Lulu.com. Lulu charges nothing for you to set up your book with them. You need to be very design savvy and have all the software and skill that designing a book requires. But once you design your own book and create your PDFs for the cover and interior, you can order your books one by one. This is still expensive per book. However, I now use this kind of printing technology for very specific purposes. I print out a few copies of my portfolio. I print photo books that I give as gifts to family or friends. And I print early draft copies of my books so that I can proofread the copy and review the cover design and layout. These are great uses of this technology, and they depend on printing very few copies and not trying to earn money off their sale. I don't use Lulu to print books in order to earn money. I can't recommend that. It won't work. But I do recommend using Lulu for these very limited cases.

SHORT-RUN DIGITAL PRESS. Many presses now offer short-run work on their digital presses. I have used a few press shops to print in-house books (like Twisted Fun, a recent collection) and even for my latest novel, American Home Life (published by So New Publishing). For Twisted Fun, I had learned how to negotiate my way through the entire book-printing process, from concept and design to budget and production, and most importantly I had realistic expectations. I spent about $250 to have 50 copies printed. That's $5/book, not great, but not bad. And over time I could earn that money back because I controlled the whole production effort, all costs and all income. For American Home Life, the publisher and I worked with another press shop and took advantage of their digital presses (they also print Ploughshares and Opium Magazine, among others) to print an initial short run, and as the first run sells out, we'll print another run, taking advantage of the digital press to better manage cash flow. So, to sum up, I can only recommend POD as an expensive learning experience and not at all as a business proposition. I recommend making chapbooks using desktop computers and binding them by hand. I recommend trying to sell your books person to person and online through websites and via Powells or Amazon but not on consignment with bookstores. And I recommend using short-run digital presses when working with a publisher to get your books into print economically and at high quality.

You mentioned the Dead Bug Funeral Kit. You have other quirky things available at your site: Picasso Plates, postcards, The Writer's Speciman (which I think should be given to every single person who wants to be a writer). How did these come about and do you see yourself as a business and not just a designer and writer?

I do not think of myself as a business. I'd be doing so many other things in the way of advertising, sales, and marketing if I thought of myself as a business and wanted to turn a profit someday. I rather think of myself as a creative person who makes fun and interesting things and then is able to sell them online. I'd like to continue to create interesting projects and eventually have other people worry about selling them. I'd like to have the Dead Bug Kit and Picasso Plates projects one day sold by a reseller, say, a bookstore chain, a catalog, a place like Restoration Hardware or whatever. I have no ambition or talent for marketing in that way, and I don't pretend to. I'd rather be writing.

It's David Barringer Week!

We all have our lists of writers we love, those writers that not everyone in the world knows about but should. Sometimes we keep these writers close to us and don't tell anyone, because we want that special bond that we have (or, probably, imagine we have) between ourselves and the author and we don't want to spoil it by telling everyone else about them. But the hell with all that. A great, talented writer deserves to be known to everyone, which is one reason why you should read the work of David Barringer.

David's latest book is the novel American Home Life, which is described as a "comic novel about contemporary suburban fatherhood," but it's so much more, and it's amazing. But his work goes beyond novels. He also...well, all that will come out in the interview below. This entire week of PBJ entries will be an interview with David. He has a lot to say, and if you're a writer or designer or do anything creative, you're especially going to want to pay attention.

Tell us a little about yourself and what you do.

I'm a writer and designer, father of two, moved to North Carolina from Michigan three years ago. I can afford to be a self-employed writer and a full-time dad because my wife is a family doctor. I went to law school, but I never practiced; I just wanted the debt. I've written a novel about a family, a novel about a rooster, a few fiction collections, and a book of graphic-design criticism. I design books and magazines, like Opium Magazine, a literary journal, and I also have a few special projects I do now and then, like The Dead Bug Funeral Kit, which includes a book of eulogies written from kids to their deceased pets.

This is interesting to me, because it seems like you've made a career for yourself as a writer in a very healthy way. You have a "real" job, you have a family, you have kids, you have a life, and it doesn't seem like you get caught up in the whole publishing game. You write what you want and publish through small presses and your own company, and you don't have an agent, but you're still successful. That seems really healthy to me.

Yes, for a writer, a healthy life is terrible luck. All happy families are alike, as Tolstoy wrote, in that a writer can't exploit them in print. The one thing that is worth emphasizing, though, is that I often was my own worst enemy in getting to this point. It took a while for me to surrender and say, "I'm a writer. Get writing." In fact, it took law school. I finished law school five figures in debt and thought, "I'm a writer. Shit." It's hard to make a living as a writer because there is no track, no professional school that can spit you out into a cubicle and a retirement package. Writers stumble and stagger through their careers. I certainly have. I've never worked in a cubicle, never shown up at an office, never taught or gotten an MFA, but I've also never had perks, never had benefits, never had security. I just have the work. So what's been healthy is that I've been able to marry someone who has a career that fits perfectly with my half of our working life, and together we're able to be there for our kids and pay the mortgage. That's a big deal, and in my writerly funks, I often need to smack myself in the head and say, "Appreciate this, you moron."

The rest of the story is that I've worked outside the mainstream publishing world, even as I've written within the mainstream magazine world. I've learned a great deal about book design, printing, publishing, sales, and marketing by doing it this way, and the main thing I've learned is that I would love for someone else to worry about all of that crap. But of course today even the big publishers expect authors to exert all sorts of effort on sales and marketing in a way they never had to do before. So, again, I smack myself in the head and appreciate the power and control I am able to have over the final product, the book, and its dissemination. It's really a pure and personal exercise of creative imagination, and I can say for most of my books, "I did that," and mean it truly. I did it. All of it. The writing, the editing, the proofreading, the cover design, the typesetting, all of it. For better or worse. The book stops here.

How do agents fit in with all of this, in your career? Is an agent necessary? Desired?

I have only two experiences. First, I sent the manuscript of my first novel out to tons of agents, and nada. Only one was interested (Donald Maass), and he did give me a great piece of advice, which I took (I cut my manuscript in half in one night). But he also asked how many short stories I'd published. The answer was none, mainly because I was already freelancing for national magazines, short stories paid diddly, and everyone kept telling me to write a novel and not fool around with short stories. The thing was, traditionally the publication of a short story in a major lit magazine like The New Yorker or Harper's or The Atlantic went a long way in getting your name around (or so goes the theory); publishers really just wanted to know if you'd built a readership. So, I started writing stories. Hundreds of them. Published in journals and, mostly, ezines, which were just blossoming at that time, around 2000. And, of course, having published tons of short stories, I discovered that editors and agents would then ask, "Yes, but do you have a novel?" What they really meant, I think today, was: "Do you have a novel similar to the latest best-selling trend, whether it's Grisham, Harry Potter, chick lit, or confessional memoir, something that will sell itself without us having to do much in the way of creative marketing for it?"

In other words, publishing a short story in a major lit magazine is a proxy for whether you have a readership. And writing a derivative novel is another proxy for whether a readership is going to buy that book. Both of these proxies are talismans against the financial risk of publishing any book. Publishers understand these proxies, even if they still don't understand what readers are ultimately going to buy.

Second, for my second novel, I did indeed send it to another agent (Lilly Ghahrameni). She spent my $200 on photocopied manuscripts Fed-Exed to a variety of major publishers. No avail. She even sent me some of their responses, but I've never read them. I already knew what they would say (mainly about structure). Anyway, that's it. That's as far as I've gotten. I think, basically, it's a damn tough business, and no one really knows what they're doing, business-wise. People in publishing obviously love books and they love writing, but they have no idea what sells. They are as shocked as anyone by the Harry Potter phenom and by the Da Vinci Code's flash in the pan and by Oprah's power. They never saw any of that coming. And, frankly, with the rise of Amazon and Barnes & Noble et al, the reactionary waves are still being felt by the industry, rolling through publishers (who have to deal with fewer but more powerful book buyers) and agents (whom editors pressure to do more to pre-market a book) and on to authors (whom agents pressure to do more to pre-market a book). A great deal of the work of thinking about marketing has been pushed all the way back onto the author, and everyone in the industry still just rides the coattails of the latest unpredictable best-seller.

So, refusing to be cynical, I quickly moved on to small presses and micropresses and people who are working hard to learn the business and get their work done. I treat writing in two ways: first, it's a passion and an art, something that creates my personality even as I create it; second, it's a job, a craft, and so I work at it, hammer and chisel, and keep moving. It's both avocation and vocation, and I never mistake the limelight for the desk lamp.

(Here are part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.)