"A Conversation with Andrew Shaffer" by Nina L. Diamond
Originally published in Independent Publisher magazine in December 2010. Reprinted with permission.
Andrew Shaffer is a 32-year-old Davenport, Iowa writer who writes a line of funny greeting cards and reviews romance novels. He will find out first-hand about the perils of publishing when his first book, Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love, comes out in January from Harper Perennial.
Prior to his teen years, he'd written humor, but as a teenager, he only wrote songs.
"I played the guitar and thought I was going to be in a rock band," he says. But, he was also an artist.
"I could never decide between being an artist and being a writer. Eventually, I found out I could do both. With the greeting cards. That was a turning point."
That was three years ago, when he was 29, but he'd already spent most of his 20s trying to write serious, literary fiction.
"In college it was very, very serious writing. I thought I was Raymond Carver or John Cheever. It didn't play very well to what my strengths were. And I was never happy when I was writing that, either. Literary fiction was depressing," he says, laughing.
Shaffer says that although Jonathan Franzen "is held up as a literary fiction guy, I don't know if he really is. Some of his stuff is close to satire, a Kurt Vonnegutesque kind of thing. I think Jonathan Franzen has more humor than the others have."
Shaffer's own pursuit of literary fiction began at the University of Iowa, where he received a BA in English. Then, he took an unexpected turn.
"I had an office management job, and an employer who would pay for me to get an MBA," he explains. "While I was taking business graduate classes, I also did a summer semester at the Iowa Writers Workshop, but the writing grad programs are very expensive and I decided not to go into debt to do that."
He continued writing while working on his MBA. "It wasn't some sort of philosophical crisis."
He stopped working for someone else "a year or two ago" he says, and now writes full-time and runs his greeting card company. It turns out that his MBA has come in handy. "I don't want to be a starving artist."
Q: What led to your first book contract?
A: I had a line of Nietzsche Valentine cards and a publisher was interested in somehow turning it into a book. It was going to be a picture book with quotes from philosophers. My agent was sending out to publishers, but they didn't want that. But, Harper Perennial did want a book based on the philosopher idea.
Q: What does your wife do?
A: She runs a rubber stamp company. We've been married for a year and a half.
Q: What led you to create a funny greeting card company?
A: For several years, I made my own greeting cards and sent them out, and one year I put them online and people started buying them. It was an outlet for my writing and art. There wasn't a lot of thought behind it initially. Nobody cares in that industry if you're self-published or an independent company or Hallmark. If it's funny, people will buy it. You can get an immediate reaction and can tell if it works or doesn't.
Q: Then, word spread, the media discovered you, and you were even interviewed on FOX News.
A: I was on FOX in 2008, the cards were on The Colbert Report, CBS interviewed me, I did local interviews, and I was interviewed on Russian television. I had put out press releases and they picked up on them. The media was looking for holiday stories and I had put out atheist Christmas cards.
Q: Did all this media coverage spike sales?
A: Being on FOX didn't do anything for sales, but being on Colbert did.
Q: How did you get an agent and a publisher?
A: In the aftermath of that, I was looking for something else to do because Christmas cards just sell for a few months a year. I thought if I could do a book that's a compilation of my Christmas cards, that would be great.
Q: Is that what you pitched to agents?
A: Yeah, and my agent and I worked on it and created a proposal. Publishers didn't want it, but HarperCollins was interested in a philosphy book loosely based on the Nietzsche Valentine cards I'd put out. But, they wanted a book, not just a compilation of cards.
Q: Were you surprised you got an agent without a huge platform?
A: I was more surprised that I got an agent without a huge body of work. I approached agents with, 'Hey, I've been on TV.'
Q: Agents are always interested in representing people based on high concept and some media attention.
A: For my friends who've got manuscripts, it's frustrating to hear that someone gets a book deal based on an idea and 'I've been on TV.' For years, I tried banging away on a novel. I tried that route. I have some novels that are probably pretty terrible. So, as soon as I thought I had something good, I thought I'd go for it. When you come out of a creative writing background at universities, they look down on everything except literary fiction or short stories. I never looked down on other forms of fiction. There are all these avenues out there. The short story/novel attitude is very limiting.
Q: The book comes out on January 4th. Are they sending you on a book tour?
A: I do have a couple of dates that I'm doing, but not a full book tour. I'll do a book reading in New York and one in Iowa City.
Q: You also review romance novels. That's an unusual thing for a guy to do.
A: When I was at the RT Booklover's Convention earlier this year, I was researching romance novels because after writing Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love, I wanted to look at successful loves stories and the majority are fictional. The only love stories that never end are fairy tales and romance novels.
Q: In real life, at some point, they all end. Even if people live to a ripe, old age before dying.
A: I was curious why this one genre mandates happy endings. If you don't write a happy ending, your romance novel isn't going to be published. I read my mother's romance novels as a kid, just for the 'dirty parts.' You can find every level from G-rated Amish romance to erotica. The stuff I review is from the Harlequin Blaze line. They're R-rated, not quite erotica, but more graphic than the run-of-the-mill romance novels.
Q: When did you start reviewing them?
A: Earlier this year, about six months ago. I review them for RT Book Reviews. They're the only magazine that's pretty much focused on that. They're in print and online. They've never had a male reviewing romance novels before. I contemplated using a pseudonymn, but thought, 'Nah.' My original plan was to try to write a romance novel. You're restricted by rules, and to try to make it interesting isn't easy. It's on the back burner right now.
Q: Why review them?
A: I was already reading them. It would be nice to get paid for that and get review copies.
Q: That's right, you've got an MBA!
A: I couldn't pass that up!
Q: What do you think now that you've read so many romance novels? Are there some that you've really enjoyed?
Q: Oh, definitely. Some are really great. I read one about baseball. It's one of the most gripping sports novels that you'll ever read. It was really focused on the man and it's something that any guy would pick up and read, except it has a shirtless baseball player on the cover. If it was packaged differently, it would have a different audience. You couldn't tell you were reading a romance novel. There's nothing wrong with the standard romance novel. Some stand on their own, some are paint by numbers. The same ratio of good to bad stuff that you'd find in any genre. There's a stereotype that romance novels are poorly written, or if you pick up one you think you've read them all. And that can't be further from the truth.
Q: So will you start a movement: Real Men Read Romance Novels? Have you been able to convince any of your male friends to read one?
A: No, I would have to have male friends who read.
Q: You don't have any male friends who read?
A: I do, but it would be an awkward conversation.
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As a journalist, columnist, essayist, and media critic, Nina L. Diamond's work has appeared in many publications, including Omni magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald. She was a regular contributor to a number of "late, great" national, regional, and newspaper Sunday magazines, including Omni; the award-winning South Florida magazine; and Sunshine, the Ft. Lauderdale (now South Florida) Sun-Sentinel's Sunday magazine.
She covers the arts and sciences; the media, publishing, and current affairs; and writes feature articles, interviews, commentary, humor/satire/parody, essays, and reviews.
Ms. Diamond is also the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers (Lotus Press) and the unfortunately titled Purify Your Body (Three Rivers Press/Crown/Random House) , a book of natural health reporting which has been a selection of The Book-of-the-Month Club's One Spirit Book Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club.
For its entire run from 1984-1998, she was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, which aired on WLRN-FM in Miami.
She has appeared on Oprah, discussing the publishing industry, but, in a case of very bad timing, that appearance was two years before her first book was published.
She has written her Much Ado About Publishing column for Independent Publisher since 2003.
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