By Katy Munger, 2016 Piedmont Laureate

As the entire reading world obsesses about the new Harry Potter — certainly, the first time in my life time that so many people have cared about reading the script to a play — my thoughts have turned to Gone With the Wind, not only because it was the blockbuster of its day but also because, when you think about it, it is a sort of sorting hat for literary tastes. I have found that how you react to the characters in GWTW can not only tell you a lot about yourself, it can also tell you a lot about the direction you should go in as a writer or reader. I have cleverly tested my theory in bars across America as I meet with other book lovers and I am pretty sure I am on to something.

Let’s start with the obvious: Scarlet. Here is a narcissistic, spoiled woman-child who toys with peoples’ emotions, treats her maid abominably, is equally dismissive to her own mother, manipulates her father in an über-Freudian fashion, obsesses over the one man she can’t have, and blithely steals her sister’s lifelong suitor for a little bit of change in the bank. Certainly, Scarlett had strength and determination. And held her family (if not the entire county) together after the Civil War. If her strength and quest for romantic fulfillment is what captivates you about her, then chances are good you are either a romance writer or into women’s fiction. On the other hand, if all you can see when you think of Scarlet O’Hara is a long line of victims toppled behind her like bowling pins and cannot help but think that she would have made an excellent serial killer, chances are good you are into crime fiction. As for myself, I can only tolerate Scarlet by pretending that we finally find out what happens to her in Streetcar Named Desire, when Blanche DuBois is led away in a coquettish delusional state by a version of the proverbial men in white coats.

Ashley Wilkes is another good litmus test. It is safe to say that all southern women fall into one of two categories: those that swoon over Ashley Wilkes, and those who prefer Rhett Butler. For me, the choice is easy. Sure, Ashley Wilkes is genteel and noble on the surface, but he doesn’t have the cajones to tell Scarlet to leave him alone, he sits around moping an awful lot for a man in the middle of a major war, he’s atrociously unhelpful when Melanie is dying, and he even gives in and kisses Scarlet when he knows that he may as well have been waving the starting flag in front of Dale Earnhardt. In short, he is too indecisive and weak for my taste, and though I loved him when I was very young and found most men loud and scary, I have little patience with him now that I am older. I prefer the Rhett Butlers of the world, though I have no illusions as to their essential character. At least Rhett was honest about who he was, recognized quickly that his love for Scarlet was toxic, stood by Belle Watling with an admirable loyalty, and could get the job done. If you are an Ashley Wilkes fan instead, I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that you are a big fan of either young adult fiction or most men active in progressive politics. We Rhett fans will be over here in the corner enjoying our thrillers and spy novels.

Melanie is another character who inspires revealing reactions by readers. She is generous and selfless, impossibly good, and thus clearly doomed from the start. How could anyone not like Melanie? But there is a difference between admiring her and wanting to be around her for too long. Melanie makes you feel inadequate. Melanie makes you feel mean and small. Melanie would make for an awesome character in a mystery book. Think about it: what if someone was actually lousy enough to whack her? Who could do such a thing? Now that would be an interesting puzzle. Melanie represents the essential good in human beings, and as such probably appeals to readers of all genres. After all, doesn’t every book explore whether people are essentially selfless or self-serving at their core?

Other lesser characters, and how you react to them, can reveal even more about your reading and writing tastes, if not your soul. Let’s take the Tarleton twins. They’re like a pair of dumb Labrador retrievers, tongues hanging out as they pant around Scarlet, fetching her barbecue and vying for a pat on the head and “good boy” from her. You just know that they will be the first to charge into the fray, without stopping to think whether it’s the smart move or not. You know they won’t make it halfway to Fort Sumter, much less Gettysburg. This cynical reaction to the Tarleton twins should have told me, early on, that I needed to go into crime fiction. If you, too, saw it coming but, unlike me, found it a little noble, may I recommend any book by Stephen Ambrose?(Although Stephen Ambrose is one of my all-time favorite authors, just for the record.)

Meanwhile, Aunt Pittypat is the litmus test for whether you are a fan of southern women’s fiction or not. If you find her iconic and endearing, please do not read Flannery O’Connor anytime soon. If you mostly want to slap her and hand her off to the Symbionese Liberation Army, welcome to the dark side. Start with Stephen King and go from there.

My reaction to the death of Bonnie Blue Butler was another clue that I like to avoid the sunny side of the street. The very fact that I could entertain a smidgen of relief that the pony did her in clearly labels me both a horrible person and a crime writer. (Although in my defense, the young actress who plays her in the movie version of GWTW is so abominably coiffed and overly cute in that saccharine 30’s kind of way that I think probably everyone should get a pass on cheering for the pony.)

Finally, we must discuss the characters of Mammy and Prissy, the O’Hara family’s house servants (and by that, the ending credits designer surely meant SLAVES). I never understood the need for comic relief in an otherwise utterly serious tale — I almost threw tomatoes during Keeper of the House in Les Miserables — and I certainly do not understand making these two, of all people, the comic relief in GWTW. I think the only sane reaction to their characters is to watch Django Unchained every time you watch GWTW in order to balance out the moral scales of the universe.

Try this literary sorting hat for yourself. Think of the characters in Gone With the Wind and your reactions to them. Then stop and marvel that fictional characters can reveal so much about you. Stop and give homage to authors who are able to create such iconic and evocative characters that people talk about them for decades, if not centuries. Then give those authors the due they deserve, whether it is Margaret Mitchell, JK Rowling, Shakespeare, or someone else whose characters haunt you. Because characters capable of striking deep chords within readers are the hallmark of great books. If you’re a writer, remember that. Take the time to build and get to know your characters before you even start to write your book.

How do you feel about the characters in Gone With the Wind? Who are some of your most memorable characters in literature? Your favorites and your least favorites? I’d love to know which characters speak to you and what they tell you about yourself or the world.

 

 

By Katy Munger, 2016 Piedmont Laureate

Whenever I conduct a writer’s workshop, I always learn something from the experience. Whether it’s an attitude or a question or, perhaps, an unexpected answer from the audience – I always leave having realized some new truth that helps me in my own writer’s journey. This past week is a great example. It was a busy week for Piedmont Laureate workshops. I conducted a workshop for elementary school students, another for high school students, and still another for adults. When I was done, I was left with the realization of how very personal imagination is, how much it fuels a writer’s need to write, and how big a role it plays in making a book your own. The week left me with a healthy respect for the connection between a writer’s imagination and their voice.

Each workshop was different, bringing a new realization about how we view imagination. The youngest children were brimming over with creativity, their boundless energy sparking idea after idea after idea. But they had something else, too: fierce pride in their own imagination, pride that sometimes spilled over into outrage when their suggestions were not adopted. I began the workshop by explaining the different elements of mystery writing and asking the children, as a group, to give me ideas for settings, motivation, plot events, and characters, especially heroes and villains. They did not need much explanation, beyond a brief discussion of those same elements as played out in the Harry Potter book series. Soon they were coming up with places to set our group mystery (college was a popular choice), heroes (many nominated themselves), and villains (they preferred their villains to be as different from themselves as possible, ideally big, bad, and easily recognizable). With nearly 30 kids in attendance, it was impossible to use everyone’s ideas—and not all of the children could cope gracefully when their suggestions were not chosen. In fact, when it became obvious how important their own ideas were to their sense of self, I changed plans and had them complete the story on their own to give all of them the opportunity to write exactly what they wished.

Later, after I had talked to two much older groups, I realized that this sense of ownership over our imagination is what creates writers. The need to give voice to our imagination, and to organize and sort it out as we see fit, is why many writers choose the solitary life of sitting in front of the computer, living with fictional characters rather than real human beings, spending hours and days and lifetimes marshaling their imaginings into stories.

In a separate workshop that same week, I taught a group of attentive teenagers a range of techniques that writers can use to organize their books and inspire compelling plots. I was amazed when, having gone through the fairly complicated process of identifying a basic book structure that appeals to today’s readers, every attendee immediately set to work creating a book timeline of their own by overlaying their own ideas onto the generic structure. Even the teenagers who walked in that day without any work in progress immediately came up with an idea for a book and steadily fleshed out that idea for over an hour. But unlike the younger children, they were almost unanimously private about their ideas. Although I encouraged them to get feedback from their desk mates, most were content to work quietly, with one-on-one help from me on how to build out their narratives. By the time we were done, I was struck by how seriously they took their ideas and envious of how they still retained an intimate connection to their imaginations. Clearly, most of their ideas came from a very personal place inside them, they recognized that, and they were instinctually driven to protect them. I started to wonder if maybe maintaining that connection and exploring the more private places of our imaginations wasn’t the key to writing a book uniquely my own.

Finally, I ended the week by conducting a workshop for 10 adults, all of whom are part of an ongoing national writers’ movement. They were intensely focused on what I was saying as I led them through my process for creating the bones of a book and using a combination of brainstorming and different outline techniques as the foundation for a strong first draft. It was clear from their questions that they were relating what I was saying to their own work in progress. As they took notes and asked me more questions, I was struck by how much they respected their own work and, by extension, their imaginations. They understood the challenges of their books and seemed eager to learn any new techniques that might help them build a better book and make it their own. Many of their questions had to do with my own choices as a writer, inspiring me to look at my own influences in more detail. I walked away from that workshop with a much clearer understanding of what drives me as a writer: my distant past, my life’s experience, my successes and my failures, my disfunctions and my strengths, my disappointments and my joys, my ideas about fairness and justice, my hopes for a better world—they are all there in my imagination, feeding the books I write. I need to understand that, and to respect that, if I hope to write books that are uniquely my own.

I used to think that it would be fascinating to be a psychiatrist for writers, that by listening to them speak as honestly as possible in the confines of a safe, treatment room, and then poring over their work to discern the unspoken pain of their lives, that I could make the connection between my own subconscious and the books I write. But now I realize that there is an inherent judgment in that scenario, an assumption that there is something in me  that needs fixing that will be revealed by my writing, an assumption that encourages a desire to hide behind words rather than use them to reveal truths (an impulse I think many other writers feel). I am going to reject that notion. I now see that attempting to scrub traces of ourselves from our imaginings is a mistake. Because our imaginations are a lot like our dreams: a stew of desires, impulses, fears, deeply rooted need, and an overwhelming drive to control our own destiny and connect to others. It’s just that, when you writing, you are given the opportunity to bring order to the chaos. Unlike dreams, you get to define how these very personal forces unfold as well the ending. But both our dreams and our imaginations are deeply, deeply personal and the only way to make what we write truly our own is to understand and respect that.

In the end, I came away from each workshop with valuable lessons that will make me a better writer. Going forward, I’m going to take fierce pride in my ideas, like those elementary school children so connected to their imaginations. Then I am going to acknowledge the connection between my ideas and the forces that drive me in this lifetime, shaping who I am. After that, rather than fearing that these inner drives might be divined by my readers, I am determined to respect the personal foundation of my imagination, honor myself, and write a more authentic book the next time I sit down to write.

 

By Katy Munger, 2016 Piedmont Laureate

When I was little girl, I used to spend whole afternoons perched in a tree in my overgrown backyard in Raleigh’s Cameron Park, reading books for hours while eating fresh tomato sandwiches on toast. I can still feel the sharp bite of toast in my mouth and the sting of tomato as I turned the pages, lost in my own private world. (That’s me on the right in the photo, in my prime tree-climbing days, no doubt clutching some unsuitable paperback to my chest. No one was getting my book away from me.)

God knows there was no shortage of books for me to choose from, and little supervision over what I read. I read from the original first editions of the Mother West Wind books, plowed through every single one of the Wizard of Oz books, and got an early dose of detective fiction with the Boxcar Children and the Bobbsey Twins. But I was just as likely to be reading Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West (clearly exhibiting a dark streak early!), or even Aldous Huxley and Sinclair Lewis. My grandfather had been a Chicago time study engineer in the meat packing business and so his shelves yielded Upton Sinclair as well as all three volumes of Shelby Foote’s Civil War series. As I got older, I discovered Lady Chatterley’s Lover and a massive medical guide to psychiatric disorders under my mother’s bed that kept me rapt for weeks. Later on, when my father became the book editor of the News and Observer, I had veritable mountains of books to choose from whenever I read. But I think one of my favorite reading experiences was methodically working my way through a huge pile of original Life magazines stacked in our living room that chronicled decades long past. I became a time traveler and still feel, deep inside me, as if I actually lived through those decades — such is the power of reading.

Later, as a real traveler barreling down the highways of the Northeast and Canada on camping trips with my family, I would sit in the boot of our station wagon, reading James Bond for hours until, bleary-eyed, I’d look up to see some massive mountain looming in the distance. As a result, I still believe, on some level, that every James Bond book takes place in Switzerland.

I took my love of reading to college, and can vividly remember reading Gone with the Wind on a hot summer day in the tiny bedroom of a trailer parked off a then-deserted Mason Farm Road outside of Chapel Hill. I was devouring the story so rapidly that one of my cats, after observing my eye movement in silent bewilderment, tried to pluck out an eyeball. It was dangerous business reading about Scarlet, but after surviving a corneal scratch, so obsessed was I that I actually read the cheesy sequel of the same name — an absorbing but ultimately unsatisfying experience that did nothing to deter me from tackling other huge tomes like James Michener‘s Hawaii. (“Is there no place on earth safe from James Michener?” — an unknown, and much funnier, book reviewer than I). The bigger the book, the better the book became my motto. Oh, for the days of a long attention span!

I was, of course, using reading as an escape. Those long afternoons in the crook of a tree were the only quiet times I had growing up in a house full of nine individuals, sometimes an equal amount of dogs, and more than enough drama. In college, books were an escape from all the decisions that awaited me about my life. Later, when I lived in New York for many years, books were a way to escape the city’s endless concrete and air of general disappointment that eventually gave me spiritual claustrophobia and sent me back to the South.

But somewhere along the way, in the midst of juggling two careers and raising a child, I lost the ability to sit and read for extended periods of time. The advent of social media did not help. Like everyone else, I was fascinated with this new online world and wasted hours of my life talking to strangers. When the instant high of the online scene faded, and the demands of the real world grew ever greater, I was left with a persistent tear in my soul that I could not quite pinpoint. I did not realize then that it was the lack of reading in my life. Thank God for my book club, if not for the past 15 years of needing to show up once a month having read the book, or at least part of it, I am not sure I would have read many books at all beyond those I was contractually obligated to review.

Then a lovely thing happened six months ago: I moved much closer to where I work and found myself with an extra hour a day to do with as I wished. Weary of computers, email, and instant messages, I was determined to spend that hour off-line. I began to reclaim even more lost hours, shut down the electronics, and spent more and more time reading. I discovered the joys of used bookstores and walked out with shopping bags full of everything from true crime to Proust. I started to read my books every Sunday morning in companionable silence with my housemate, one of the few people I have ever known who can actually read the entire New York Times. Every session spent reading seemed to restore some lost part of myself. I began reading for an hour after work each day in my side yard, enjoying the green among the green (as Graham Greene himself would say). Little by little, I reclaimed my reading time and reclaimed myself along the way. Now, without apology, at least once a day, I do not return messages, I ignore Facebook posts, and I let the e-mails sit as I take a book and withdraw to my solitary pleasure and let the calm of being lost in a private world wash over me. I am grateful to have found this peace — and I feel myself becoming whole again in some mysterious way.

It is nearly impossible to find privacy in this world we live in. There are always noises coming at you, messages pinging, phones ringing, images moving, and people bombarding you with ways to spend your money. Reading remains one of the very few solitary pleasures left and I am grateful I have re-discovered it.

If you, too, feel the world is too much with us these days, I highly recommend that you return to reading as well. I don’t think it matters what you choose. What matters is that you give yourself the time to sit, insulated from the madness around you, lost in the world of your pages, just you and your book, and an engaged imagination, and a soul that is grateful for the rest.

 

By Katy Munger, 2016 Piedmont Laureate

On Saturday night, as part of the Piedmont Laureate program, I joined a number of other North Carolina writers in greeting people as they entered the North Carolina State University Theater to see two wonderful mystery-related shows, The Hollow and Something’s Afoot. What a wonderful experience it was to see groups of people entering the lobby, their faces animated with the expectation that they were soon to see something new. Even better, I was able to meet and talk with many of them, introducing them to the writers there so they could learn more about their books. I was struck by how engaged the theatergoers all seemed, as well as by the diversity of the crowd — people of all shapes, sizes, ages and backgrounds, all there to share in the experience of live theater. They brought good-humored curiosity to meeting the authors waiting for them and it was wonderful to see one new connection after another being made. A number of people had their children in tow. I wanted to throw my arms around those parents and thank them for making sure that at least some young people grew up understanding the joy of being a part of the arts.

“It’s just such a different feeling,” one dapper gentleman told me. “You are part of something volatile and alive. Each show is a different experience from the one before.” He remembered a show he had seen at the theater a few seasons before where, when the actor bowed, his wig flew off and skittered across the stage. “You just never know what will happen!” he said happily.

Was he in search of cultural enrichment? No. I think he just wanted to feel alive and be more than a sack of meat and bone staring, slack-jawed and drooling, at a flickering screen.

The theatergoers were a great crowd to talk to about reading. Most of them were devoted readers and eager to meet new authors and take a look at the books we write. They wanted to talk about ideas, they were open to making new friends, and they seem relaxed and at ease with themselves. There was a camaraderie in the lobby, a sort of shared acknowledgment that everyone there had something in common and that it was okay to drop the suspicion that is so easy to adopt towards strangers these days.

We need a nation of people like this. I am convinced that people who get up off their couches and head out to see theater, or attend author readings, or enjoy an arts performance of any kind, end up being less afraid of the world, less affected by the histrionic messages that pour into our homes via media, bringing fear and hostility and that persistent sense of vague doom that relentless news reports and shares of those reports can create. It is so easy to get caught up in the constant stimulation of one outrage or disaster after another that I think we sometimes forget to be a participant in the world, rather than simply a watcher of it.

I wish we could find more ways to get people out of their homes and out to arts performances. I wish we could convince more people to turn off their televisions and skip the shopping mall and take a chance on a music or theater experience, or meeting an author, or viewing a new painting or photography show, or seeing once and for all what modern dance is all about. All of these art forms are, at their heart, a form of expression and simply being there, to witness that expression, shows a respect for other people and that makes the world a better place.

So please join me in vowing to be a more active participant in what is somewhat demeaningly called “culture” these days. Be one of those happy, engaged people in the world. Be one of those people with open minds who seek out the unexpected. Be one of those people who would rather see something they don’t understand than sit on a couch and watching a television show they already know the inevitable ending to. Go ahead and buy those season tickets. Go ahead and invite a friend to the next show. And if you have kids, take them to the theater, to the art gallery, to a dance performance. Let them see for themselves how much richer life can be when it doesn’t come at you through an electronic screen.

By Katy Munger, 2016 Piedmont Laureate

This blog post is the final installment of an adaptation of a talk I gave on April 26th at the Cameron Village Library. Prior posts focused on the future of libraries and books. In this final post, I discuss how the world is changing for writers and why we need to change how we define success as well as what it is that we are aiming for when we write.

It’s not easy being a writer in a world where the way we communicate and absorb information changes, literally, by the day. Worse, for too many writers, this is today’s reality:

It is more difficult than ever to make a living writing books. With the rise of ebooks, more people than ever are publishing even as traditional publishers offer authors smaller advances and less support for books outside the mainstream. To make a living writing good books is even harder: you can’t make big money as an author without devoting significant amounts of your time marketing your work—yet time devoted to marketing is time away from perfecting, revising, or writing your books.

Big publishers follow a throw it against the wall and see what sticks spaghetti strategy. Authors come cheap. For a few thousand dollars, they can lock down a book, keep the competition from getting that author, throw some copies out there, and then wait and see if lightning strikes and someone manages to break out by the grace of the Internet gods or a lucky break.

Big publishers are way too fond of distracting authors in hopes we won’t notice how badly we are being treated. They do this by pitting us against one another (trust us, we’re not each other’s enemies) and by sending us off to market our own books using whatever the technique du jour may be. Maybe if we’re busy blogging or self-promoting on Facebook, we won’t notice our publisher didn’t buy a single ad or schedule a single interview for our newest book.

Even if you do get signed by a major publisher, it’s almost impossible to break in no matter how good your book is. Because good, new books rarely sell. What sells is another book by a name brand author, or a book by someone similar who can convince an existing big name to throw their endorsement behind them.

What do we do under these circumstances? We can start by naming it right and by claiming the power that we do have.

And what we have the power to do is control is the writing process itself, the stories we tell, what audiences we write for, and how we present our books to the public. To claim your power, start by rejecting the idea that writers are irrelevant today. As writers, we are the only people in our world who provide depth you can’t find anywhere else, depth needed to counteract the superficiality of the rest of the information we receive today. We are the only ones putting all the superficial instant messages coming at us in context and provide other people with perspective. We are the ones who connect humanity, for, absent personal contact, it is within the context of a tale that people cross demographic and geographic boundaries, to learn about one another while realizing the truth about humans: no matter where we come from, we are always more alike than we are different and we must remember to honor how we are alike if we hope to survive this world as a species.

So yes, you have great power to shape the world for the better. This is my advice to those of you seeking to claim that power:

Know why you write and who you are writing for. Is it to shine a light on how to survive a crisis? Is it to inspire people to live life more fully, or to make people laugh? Don’t type a single word until you know exactly why you are writing, who you are writing for, and how you want people to react to what you have written.

Tailor your outlet to why you write. Not everyone will have a goal that can be achieved or an audience that can be reached by having a book published by a mainstream publisher. Find your audience, learn how and where they read, then choose an outlet and a format that will bring you in touch with that audience—whether it is a full length book, self-publishing, a series of online novellas, a graphic novel, a podcast, a blog, or some other medium.

Don’t define your success by whether you get a contract from a brand name publisher. Define your success by whether you have reached the audience you were trying to reach.

Don’t play their game beyond the first three innings. If you do not get a big advance from a mainstream publisher, they have no incentive to market you. So if you do go the traditional route, and you don’t get a decent advance and marketing support by the time you reach your third book with them, find another publisher or find another way to reach your audience. Otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.

Only write a good book, with your truth in it, when you have something to say, no matter what your genre is. Find your voice and write your book with it:  never imitate someone else… don’t write solely to try and create a bestseller because the chances are zero that you will… and above all, remember that the world does not need another bad book. If you can’t write a book with you in it, you are only contributing to information overload and that may well end up dooming us all.

Understand that the real value of being a writer lies in the process itself. You are privileged to sit down and write. Feel it, enjoy it, and make the process your destination. That’s where you will be spending 99.999% of your time. Don’t waste that time. Experience it and make it count.

Participate in author co-ops and other group efforts like book tours and online marketing campaigns. Channel the power of social media for all. These are your people. Support one another.

Support and honor small publishers. Help them publicize their books. Buy their books. Give them a chance to publish your book. They are our only hope for keeping quality in the book-selling business and preserving the diversity of our voices.

Protect your writing time. If you are an author, put your talent and your energy into writing. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. No one can be a great writer, agent, designer, and publicist all at the same time. If you have to publicize your own books, save up your money and hire someone else to do it. If you have to design your own book or eBook, and you’re not proficient at it, then hire someone else to do it for you. Your job is to write.

None of these ideas are magic bullets. None of these ideas are mine alone. But they are a start and we need to start the discussion now. In closing, I’d like to urge you to be part of the discussion. Talk about it today. Make it real. Be a writer citizen of the literary world. Be a writer willing to shape the writing experience rather than sitting and taking what the future brings.

 

 

by Katy Munger, 2016 Piedmont Laureate

Part 3 of a talk I gave at the Cameron Village Library on April 26, adapted for this blog.

What does the future hold for books? I don’t mean the construction, I mean the contents—whether print or ebook. In a few decade’s time, will there even be room in our world for writing that requires attention for longer than a few moments?

My answers to both questions are simple in concept, but complex in execution. Yes, there will be room for books in the future. In fact, we will need books more than ever. Only books can illuminate the most important aspects of being human, put those aspects in context, unite people around them, and overcome the polarizing effect that 30-second messages have. Only books have the power to promote deeper thought and combat the oversimplification of issues and advice flooding our world today. But the real truth of the matter is that the future of books may depend on what we, as the readers of today, start doing now. As readers, we must find a way to:

• Keep good books alive, books that go beyond the limited bestseller list selections forced on us by publishers and large book store chains that focus solely on profits.
• Filter out poorly written books, especially when it comes to ebooks.
• Keep small publishers afloat: they are a critically needed break-through option for authors whose voices are not yet recognized.
• Support local bookstores attempting to survive financially while giving books beyond the bestseller list a place on their shelves.
• Use libraries as a way to promote emerging authors.

So how do we, as readers make that happen? For a start:

• Review, share, discuss, have an opinion, weigh in, keep the flame alive, pledge allegiance not just to your favorite authors but to the world of reading itself. Become an active reader and, by that, I mean an engaged citizen of the reading world. One who shuts a book and asks the question: “How can I tell more people about this book? How can I be this book’s voice?”
• Seek out authors, don’t wait to be told who to read by big publishers or the bestseller lists. The internet is full of advice and recommendations. Pinpoint what you enjoy—fiction, nonfiction, humor, learning, inspirational, self-help—and then go out and uncover the hidden gems in your genre.
• If you follow a big name author and they phone in it—let them know. Don’t rave about a book just because you love the author or everyone else is talking about it. Your opinion counts. Give the author and publisher feedback. Let other readers know. Life is too short and there are too many good books out there for anyone to waste time on a poorly written or derivative one.
• Use your discretion in evaluating online reviews: are they real reviews, written by real readers? Is the review by someone who bothered to actually read the entire book or are they passing judgment after only a handful of pages. Is a rave review a plant or a for-pay review? It’s not hard to pick up the patterns and learn to spot the real ones. Join an online readers site, like Good Reads, for guidance from other readers.
• Support efforts to bring taste to the world of ebooks. Leave reviews on ebooks. Support filtering services. I dream of a Good Housekeeping style reviewing service for eBooks, where writers pay a small fee for an objective organization to read and rate their book. Authors and publishers submit their books for review and readers look for this seal before they buy. Some websites are doing this on a smaller scale, but we need an industry-wide rating system devoid of commercial influences. If you know of a good ebook screening service, or have a better idea on how we can screen the millions of ebooks flooding the market, post it in the comments below. We need to find a way to elevate the good books lost in the ebook avalanche or we risk killing the benefits that ebooks could give to tomorrow’s authors.
• Demand the benefits of technology:  buy your hard copy books online from small publishers, small bookstores, or even the authors themselves… insist your local book store order print-on-demand books that you want… lobby for the big chains to pioneer print-on-demand machines in their stores so that consumers can choose from thousands of titles and have a book custom-made while they wait. In short, don’t settle for what stores carry on their shelves. Demand they listen to readers and not just sales reps.
• Work with your local bookstore or library to sponsor exhibits and events that celebrate new authors, feature local authors, honor overlooked authors, or publicize small publisher offerings.
• Attend readings, even those by lesser known writers, and publicize their events and books on your social media feeds. They need you to help spread the word about their writing and the power of books. Help them keep the flame alive.

Do you have other ideas for promoting the future of books or getting the word out on worthy authors? I’d love to hear your thoughts below. With enough good ideas, we can create a Reader’s Pledge and start a campaign to get people to sign it. Let’s keep the future of books alive.