Comments on: What Responsibility Do Editors Have for Keeping Fake Memoirs Off the Market?

By: » Reconciling memory and accounts from official documents in non-fiction writing: Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying signifyincaribwoman

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:09:31 +0000

[...] writing. One might ask (given recent discoveries of fraudulent non-fictions, and several calls for closer fact-checking of such works) does Danticat’s blending of memory and accounts from documented facts in Brother, I’m [...]

By: 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom

1minutebookreviewswordpresscom — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:38:09 +0000

Not off-topic at all, because you’ve hit on a central truth of publishing today: Category matter a lot.

Whether a book is labeled “fiction” or “memoir” can make a huge difference to sales, partly because memoirs generally sell better than fiction. (That’s particularly true of authors who don’t have a strong following; some of John Updike’s novels might have sold better than his memoir, “Self-consciousness”). So there are lots of numbers back up your comment that “real life” makes for better sales.

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to go into more detail on this.
Jan

By: moonbeammcqueen

moonbeammcqueen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:01:37 +0000

This may be a little off-topic, but these deceptions have been going on for so long, and it seems that they just started angering people when James Frey duped Oprah. “Go Ask Alice,” was a hoax, as were Carlos Castaneda’s books. JT Leroy’s books were a major deception– the intrigue spanned almost ten years, but no one seemed to be terribly upset when he/she was unmasked. All of the writing in these books is beautiful to me, but I may never have gotten my hands on them had they been promoted as fiction. I guess “real life” makes for better sales in the publishing world.

By: 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom

1minutebookreviewswordpresscom — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:57:47 +0000

You’ve noticed that about fair use, too? The overkill seems to happen a lot. You have the sense that some publishers are paranoid about the wrong things (such as getting unnecessary permissions) but not paranoid about the right ones (such as wholesale fabrication).
Jan

By: knightofswords

knightofswords — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:50:35 +0000

Having grown up in a journalism environment, I’m used to the aggressive copy editor formula. Publishers’ editors nit pick everything else to death as they go through MSS, so perhaps it’s not too much to ask that if they’re going to be manic about getting permissions to quote things that fall within fair use and don’t need permissions, they might look at the stuff that matters: the facts and sources of facts claimed as truth in the MS.

Malcolm