pivoting
martinesque
by manjula martin
Dear you,
The other day I was talking to someone at a barbecue and they were like, oh I must have accidentally unsubscribed to your newsletter, I never get it anymore and I was like, no, it's just been [checks calendar] eight months since I sent one out. Time, what even is it.
Since it's been a while, a refresher: this newsletter used to be called three cents and it was "about" writing + money but lately it's been more about ... well, whatever I want. Which usually includes those prior topics, because I think about them a lot, but may also include whatever else it is that I'm currently thinking about/reading/working on. I have a book coming out soon, and this is all self-promotion anyway, let's face it, so ... here we are. There will be no regular schedule. There will still be links. It will not be called three cents anymore. New title tk.
The other day I was talking to someone at a barbecue and they were like, oh I must have accidentally unsubscribed to your newsletter, I never get it anymore and I was like, no, it's just been [checks calendar] eight months since I sent one out. Time, what even is it.
Since it's been a while, a refresher: this newsletter used to be called three cents and it was "about" writing + money but lately it's been more about ... well, whatever I want. Which usually includes those prior topics, because I think about them a lot, but may also include whatever else it is that I'm currently thinking about/reading/working on. I have a book coming out soon, and this is all self-promotion anyway, let's face it, so ... here we are. There will be no regular schedule. There will still be links. It will not be called three cents anymore. New title tk.
Here's what's up:
My next book, Fruit Trees for Every Garden: An Organic Approach to Growing Apples, Pears, Peaches, Plums, Citrus, and More,* comes out August 27 from Ten Speed Press, and it looks like this:
You can pre-order it now** from an indie bookstore. (FYI, most bookstores will ship to you! Powell's is great about this and so is Green Apple, my former place of employ (twice!), as is Bookshop Santa Cruz, my hometown bookstore that is run by a person with whom I went to high school!)
If you're an Amazon person, you can pre-order it there. I will even spare you the lecture about how evil Amazon is, just this once.
You can also just walk into any bookstore and ask them to order it. They can look it up in their computer and can put in an order now and the bookstore will stock it when it comes out. (This is generally a great thing to do whenever you're in a bookstore and notice that they don't stock your friend/acquaintance/favorite author's book. Just ask them to stock it and they probably will. Retail, it's amazing!
As you may have gathered, Fruit Trees for Every Garden is a gardening book. One might say this is a bit of a "pivot" for me, as I generally identify as a Literary Writer Person. But the pivot makes perfect sense to me, because the values and systems embodied in this book are the ones I was raised on—and because I cowrote this book with my father, Orin Martin, who has been teaching apprentices how to grow stuff at the Alan Chadwick Garden at UC Santa Cruz for as long as I've been alive. If you're tuned in to a certain sphere of the food world (organic, farm-to-table-to-tummy, farmers market-y stuff) you probably already know what a power bio that is. If not, I'm about to tell you. My dad is a genius gardener, teacher, and steward of the soil. Also a bit of a poet. So if you like to garden and want to grow one or a hundred fruit trees, or if you have no idea how to take care of that apple tree that has always been in your yard, or if you don't garden but are interested in how to better understand the dirt beneath your feet and its capacity to feed humans ... you should get this book. If you have friends or family who like to garden, you should get them this book.
Plus, this is probably the only gardening book in the world to have an index entry for Eddie Vedder and a sidebar suggesting that we take back Silicon Valley from the tech companies by reclaiming their land for fruit orchards. And the pruning section is seriously NEXT LEVEL. Is your interest piqued yet?!
Plus, this is probably the only gardening book in the world to have an index entry for Eddie Vedder and a sidebar suggesting that we take back Silicon Valley from the tech companies by reclaiming their land for fruit orchards. And the pruning section is seriously NEXT LEVEL. Is your interest piqued yet?!
linkage:
"The blues is the roots. All the other musics are the fruits." (A quote my dad would definitely have wanted to include in the book if this piece had come out before we finished it.)
Meanwhile, on my old beat, the news that very successful writers don't always make a lot of money will surprise absolutely no one who reads this newsletter. But I gotta say it's gratifying to see people talking more openly about money and creative work. To wit:
"When I first read Virginia Woolf’s dictum that 'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,' I was homeless."
“When I started doing the ‘I don't get out of bed for less than $4 a word’ thing, people started paying me $4 a word,”
"I still worry about health insurance. I save most of my money because I feel like all of this could be illusory."
Anne Trubek's newsletter about running an independent press / how publishing really works is also a good thing (and will be a book soon, I hear!)
Say what you will about spon-con millennials, but I still think about Tavi's editor's letter a lot.
Ah, the internet.
Now that the gardening book is done, I'm going to pivot *again* and get back to working on my next book, a novel, which is "about" earthquakes.
Speaking of the earth, if humans weren't probably going extinct we'd definitely all be going to hell. (Related: Sarah Miller is writing some good shit for Popula, look her up.) Or choking on the smoke from it. So maybe it make sense to fall in love with ice.
In an effort to dim my distractions and write this damn novel, I have quit Netflix. I got Kanopy and Hoopla and the only streaming thing I pay for right now is the new Criterion Channel. Yeah, I've become that guy. But... fuck the algorithm. Netflix's movies suck, you guys. (I do miss easy access to Star Trek Next Gen, though. Like, a lot.)
It turns out that some of the women creators of some of the biggest cultural touchstones of the 1990s were not given due credit or subsequent employment by Hollywood. Shocker.
"They can blow me! That’s a quote. You can print that."
"They can blow me! That’s a quote. You can print that."
In the metaphysical department: Happy summer solstice! If you are the kind of person who sometimes exclaims, "uugh, mercury is SO in retrograde" but also maybe doesn't quite know what that means (I'm raising my own hand here), you should order my witchy friends' book.
And if you're a white person who likes to dabble in lifestyle witchery (still raising my own hand here) you should maybe be careful with that.
Work #goals.
Hobby #goals.
As a Tattooed Person, I am a sucker for interesting tattoo crossover journalism pieces. Here's one: it turns out that when you put art on human skin, and the human wearing the skin gets a licensing deal, things sometimes get complicated, legally speaking.
And in Scratch anthology news: the contributors continue to be absolutely awesome. Check out recent work by geniuses Nell Boeschenstein, Nina MacLaughlin, Sarah Smarsh (and her dad!), Colin Dickey, and Kiese Laymon (who should be on the fucking cover of the New York Times Magazine). There are even more amazing Scratch contribs who are doing amazing work but we are running out of word count here...
"Our coworkers had moved here to be a part of the future, but we were left over from something that had already passed." Argue about it all you want, but San Francisco is not okay, you guys, and this genre of essay shall continue to be written until it is no longer necessary.
Okay, I decided: The new title of this newsletter is martinesque, which was an old handle I used to use back in the days before internet content labor under one's own name was compulsory in our culture and also it was maybe the name of a punk trio I briefly started and recorded one song with? James and Becca, I love you.
Anyway. Time passes, apparently. Make your art, dudes.
xo,
m.
*Why yes, that is indeed a crazy-long subtitle for a book! Honestly I haven't even memorized it yet myself, I just call it Fruit Trees for Every Garden: An Organic Approach. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you're curious as to why all contemporary nonfiction books have insanely wordy subtitles, it's because of key word searches on The Internet. So this is basically another thing you can blame Amazon for (along with destroying the retail economy, exploiting low-wage workers, killing the USPS, and just generally being evil, I told you I would spare you the lecture only that one time!). That said, long subtitles aren't exactly a new thing in publishing. When I used to work at a bookstore selling rare books on the internet, I would daily come across some doozies from ye olden days; stuff like (deep breath): A Treatise on the Culture and Management of Fruit Trees, In Which a New Method of Pruning and Training is Fully Described, To Which is Added a New and Improved Edition of 'Observations on the Diseases Defects and injuries, in All kinds of Fruit and Forest Trees', by William Forsyth (1803) (which if you are rich you should totally buy for me as a present, thanks). And yes, we absolutely would have given our gardening book a subtitle like that in homage to olden textes, if our publisher had let us.
**Okay, so, pre-orders are important, which is why authors always tell you to do them. Basically, pre-orders tell publishers that there is demand for an author's book, so the publisher is more likely to put some muscle into marketing it. If you've been following my work for a while, you may be aware that many publishers don't really do much to publicize books that aren't #1 Top Marquee Name releases. Authors are expected to do a lot of the promo. But if it seems like there's "buzz" for a book (i.e., advance demand), publishers help out more, thereby enacting the oribourous of book publicity: we won't promote this unless we know it's already getting attention so then we'll promote it and so then it'll get more attention. Perhaps more important, pre-orders also tell bookstores that the public will want the book when it comes out, so they are more likely to stock it in the first place. And here's a fun fact I only recently learned: all the orders that are made before a book's publication date will count as first-week sales, which can definitely help get a book on a bestseller list. I don't anticipate this book displacing, say, the new E.L. James on the NYT list but still, pre-orders do help. (Caveat: see Anne Trubeck's newsletter, plugged above, for a rant on how preorders can kinda screw over small publishers because Amazon=evil). (My dad's and my book is not with an independent publisher, we are with one of the Big Five—Ten Speed Press, which used to be an independent publisher but is now a division of Crown, which itself is a division of Penguin Random House, which I STILL can't believe missed the opportunity to name itself Random Penguin when it merged a few years ago. Publishing!)
Later, skaters.
-m.
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