February 2015 – Writing Across Genres

My First Hate Mail as an Author

February 18, 2015February 17, 2015 by Lev Raphael

I’ve warned creative writing students that they can’t expect that everyone will like their work. Some people may actively hate it. Who knows why? That’s just a writer’s life.

I’ve never thought about hate email, though, until I recently posted a blog on The Huffington Post titled “Why Don’t Jewish Lives Matter?” It was about the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket massacres; I wondered whether the world would have been as outraged if the terrorists had only targeted the supermarket.

By the time the blog had received close to 800 Likes, Facebook Shares, and shares on Twitter (it eventually more than doubled that), it also got plenty of vicious response, too. No surprise, there. People seem completely unashamed to parade their full range of prejudices on line, especially on places like The Huffington Post responses boards.

I was surprised, though, to get a long,vicious email in my Inbox from someone apparently enraged by the blog’s title. This person’s screed was the same illogical slumgullion you see with all kinds of haters, while reading as if it were checking items off a list from Anti-Semitism for Dummies. In other words, vile, but totally unoriginal and cookie-cutter.

Naturally it started off by saying that Israel was the problem because of its treatment of Palestinians. This is classic post-war anti-Semitism because it blames all Jews everywhere for every action of every Israeli government. Are Americans responsible for the drone strikes deaths in Yemen and Pakistan? The half million dead in Iraq since the U.S. invasion?

As you might might expect, the ribbon on the package was the equation of Israelis with Nazis. See? All Jews = Israelis = Nazis. That explains everything. But the writer wasn’t done. There was more venom to spew. The other ridiculous charge was that Jews were misusing the Holocaust to their own ends and playing the victim. Charming, no? Finally it slid into some Old School Jew-hatred by labeling Jews as repulsive, arrogant, and unbearably cruel.

The email reeked of contempt, disgust, and brutality. A psychologist might see a writer with tremendous shame issues coping with that shame by expressing grotesque superiority over others. If you click the link to the original blog you’ll find comments just as vicious. These people clearly aren’t at all troubled by going public with their Jew-hatred, unlike the person who sent me the email. Feel free to guess why my correspondent wanted to write privately.

I started writing this blog on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and was moved to finish it because of the shootings in Copenhagen. King said that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” I’ve revered MLK since 4th grade, but I don’t think there’s enough light in the universe to bring these haters out of their own darkness? It makes them feel too good.

Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books, most recently Assault With a Deadly Lie, a novel of suspense. You can read about his other books at the Lev Raphael Amazon page.

Too Many Reviewers Have Closed Minds

August 29, 2021February 16, 2015 by Lev Raphael

A common complaint among indie authors is that it’s hard to get their books reviewed, no matter how well written, edited, and produced they are.

But reviewer prejudice is nothing new. Take a look at Best Books of 2014 lists. The one from the New York Times is typical: ten books, and only is from an independent press. Back when I reviewed crime fiction for the Detroit Free Press, I watched as my colleagues around the country routinely ignored trade paperback originals and books from terrific small houses like Bitter Lemon and City Lights. Independent presses and university presses still struggle to get their books reviewed.

I saw this myself in my own writing career when I moved my mystery series from a large New York firm to an independent press: the number of reviews my books got shrunk dramatically when I appeared in trade paperback vs. hardcover. You’d think my being a reviewer, too, might have made a difference. It didn’t. The mysteries almost always got the four “pre-pub” reveiws: Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal. My tenth mystery recently got a starred PW, but the other three ignored it.

Too many reviewers still seem to think that big press = quality. That makes me laugh. I’ve just read books in a row from major new York houses with gross typos all the way through: missing words, words stuck together without a space between them, and a whole host of basic errors that should never have seen their way into print. This happens often enough to make me think that copy-editing is no longer high priority for many New York house houses; getting product out there is.

Too many reviewers, whether in print or on sites like Salon, seem to instinctively reach for the big press books. It’s less work, but it reveals prejudice and a lack of imagination. It’s also self-indulgent. When I was at the Free Press, with with hundreds of books coming to me every year, I felt I was doing my readers a disservice by not digging deeper into those piles to find books they might never hear of or see otherwise. And it was always exciting to discover a writer I didn’t know and could champion from my corner of the reviewing world. As a writer myself, I looked for these treasure that would make my own writing life richer and found them just as often in places other reviewers ignored.

Lev Raphael is the author of Book Lust! (Essays for Book Lovers) and 24 other books in genres from memoir to mystery. Check out the trailer here.

The Writer’s Life Can Be Crazy

January 18, 2020February 3, 2015 by Lev Raphael

Writers don’t tend to talk openly about their disappointments. It’s too revealing and often too painful. But we’ve all had them in one form or another, whether it’s a prize we didn’t get or a book that bombed.

My biggest one in a decades-long career came by way of an agent. This wasn’t your ordinary agent. Oh, no. She was one of the biggest in the country, with clients on the best seller list and a history of major deals.

When she read my book, she gave me the kind of feedback for making changes you’d expect from the best, smartest, most tuned-in editor. And her emails were as upbeat as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Working with her her was like jamming with a fellow jazz musician–we were so much in sync. But there were some false notes. She wanted the book to open in a way I thought was deadly dull, and she wanted to change the title to something awful.

I won about the title, but caved on the opening. Maybe she saw something I didn’t? Then she she arranged meetings in New York with almost two dozen bigwigs in publishing–people at the very top of their houses or imprints, people I’d read about but never dreamed would be looking at a book of mine.

Her talk was as bold and inspiring as her editorial advice. There was going to be an auction, and she thought $100,000 was a good floor. This was dizzying to someone who’d never gotten more than a $15,000 advance on a book.

Then the bomb dropped. She launched her campaign to sell my book just before Thanksgiving, even though I’d expressed some anxiety about that, I’d always thought the period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s was when publishing slowed way, way down. At least in my experience, and I had published quite a few books by then. On top of that, the stock market had collapsed in New York, publishers were firing staff and in a state of panic.

I’ll never know if she would have sold the book in a better financial climate, but I do that when she failed, know she dropped me in a New York minute, wouldn’t consider revisions and acted as if as if I had somehow disappointed her. Her advice at that point was brief: “Why don’t you write a memoir? Those are flying out the door!” And then she handed me off to her assistant.

I was crushed. That’s not hyperbole. Six years later, the wound of being revved up by her and then dropped still stings.

I told her I’d already written a memoir that was being published (and had sold before I signed with her) and couldn’t write another on command. Besides, even if I could, I wondered if she would have as much success with a memoir of mine as she had with my novel.

Ironically, that memoir hadn’t earned me much of an advance, but when it was published soon after this debacle, it scored me dozens of very well-paid speaking gigs in the U.S., Canada, and Germany. I made many new friends, And then I sold my current and future literary papers to Michigan State University’s Special Archives for a satisfying sum at a time when authors I know were having trouble giving their papers away.

A very dark time turned deeply fulfilling, almost magical. As we say in New York, “Who knew?” When I related this crazy sequence of events to a friend, he said, “Writers can be as normal as anyone else, but their lives are manic depressive.” And he couldn’t be more right. We go from high to low, sometimes within the same day, our careers as crazy as the stock market, trying to hold onto what really matters: the work we’ve devoted our lives to.

Lev Raphael is the author of Writer’s Block is Bunk and 24 other books in genres from memoir to mystery. His work is taught in colleges and universities across the U.S. and has been translated into 15 languages. You can read more about his books at his web site.