How to Sell an Old White Guy's Novel...
by Jason Makansi (originally posted on Substack)
This is the verbatim comment from my wife this morning: “No one wants to read stuff from an old white guy except old white guys and they don’t read or buy fiction.” Part of the English muffin I had just stuffed down my throat almost came out my nose.
Well, there’s a challenge, I thought. What to say to that?
I governed my professional life, which is about as far from fiction writing as can be, with a few simple maxims. One was, “when in doubt, shut up.” Another was, whenever I was struggling with how to say or write something, “just tell the truth.”
Here are some truths about me. I’m only “white” because the U.S. census and medical forms say I am. Actually, I am half Syrian (yes, one of the shithole countries), half Greek, and all-American. My Syrian father immigrated in the early 1950s to earn his chemistry and Chemical Engineering degrees from Columbia University and complete a PhD on fundamental technology important to the nascent nuclear power program. My Greek mother was born and raised in Billings, Montana, earned her BA at Northwestern in Chicago, and attended the Julliard school of Music in NYC.
When I say (in my Substack bio) I reside at the intersection of too many circles on the Venn diagram of life, I’m not kidding. Geographically, I was born in Wilmington, Del (bonus points if you can guess who was my father’s employer his entire career. Hint: The company was sued in the 1970s for monopolizing the state). My family moved to Chattanooga, TN, when I was ten. I left for college in NYC at eighteen, Iived in Manhattan for thirteen years minus the year I worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Then I lived in Bucks County, PA and commuted to NYC for work. Then we moved our family to St. Louis (we lived in the city of St. Louis, not the County) and lived there two decades. I’ve lived in Tucson, AZ (also in the city) for ten years.
So, I’m a Greek, Syrian, Yankee, Southern, New York, Midwestern, Westerner.
Professionally, I have a BS in Chemical Engineering, but every elective I took in college was in the humanities, especially courses which would train me as a writer. I remember telling one of my roommates, an anthropology major, “When you get out of college, you won’t be able to understand what I do, but when I get out, I’ll be able to understand what you do.”
After working as an engineer (mostly on environmental projects) for a few years after college, I spent the next twenty years working my way up the masthead as a writer and editor at an engineering trade publication (one of the oldest magazines in America, actually) serving the energy industry.
Are these Venn circles becoming clear?
During that time I wrote and published two professional books for the electricity industry, one very successful - for a hot minute. Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, The Global Economy, and What It Means To You was ranked under 400 on Amazon in 2008 and was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal as well as many other newspapers—back when newspapers had thriving book sections.
Jason’s books on the electricity business.
I also wrote dozens of short stories and even managed to get a bunch of them published in obscure literary journals, most of which are now defunct.
I also wrote a novel that touches on my Syrian heritage.
Postcard and description of The Moment Before by Jason Makansi.
In 2009, I started down the road towards a higher degree in sociology (my favorite subject in college), researching financial engineering and corruption. I was pretty pissed off about the rampant Enron-style corruption in the energy industry and the financial crisis of 2007-2008. When they told me I had to take the GREs to continue, I said, fuck that, I have more experience in the real world of sociology than everyone in this classroom combined. And I wasn’t about to take a standardized test to prove it.
I’ve also done a lot of volunteer work, ranging from Media Director, NYC chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in the early 1980s (back when Mayor Ed Koch called all Arabs animals) to serving on the Tucson Planning & Development Commission today, and pretty much everything in-between over the past four decades.
Oh, have I mentioned I launched an energy and environmental newsletter in 1990, co-founded a hedge fund focused on investment opportunities in the electricity sector, and have proposed what I believe are the most innovative strategies for addressing global climate disruption (check out Carbon IRA & YouTility: How to Address Climate Change & Reward Carbon Reduction Before It’s Too Late)? In my consulting work, I was a specialist in AI technology (focused on automating power plants) before Sam Altman was born?
How to save the world from carbon emissions before it’s too late.
My wife and I launched a publishing company, Blank Slate Press, with an innovative business model. The model didn’t work out, but the company still lives on after it merged with another small press. Now, she’s a successful writer and publisher in her own right (and why she has license to tell me about book marketing). Total sales of books with her name on them are inching towards 60,000.
I had contemplated writing a book on numerical literacy for many years. You cannot believe how many billions upon billions of dollars are invested (and wasted) in companies, government contractors, and academic researchers because someone manage to create a better narrative with a bunch of phony forecasts, complex calculations, and pretty graphics, and the investors/funders really have no idea what they are talking about.
You cannot believe how many journalists take whatever numbers are reported to them as gospel because their academic training doesn’t include any practical quant skills.
When Trump got elected in 2016, I thought, geez, much of the American public doesn’t even understand the electoral college. So, I hurriedly finished up and published Painting By Numbers: How to Sharpen Your BS Detector and Smoke Out the Experts in 2016. It won both the Independent Publishers IPPY GOLD and the Foreword Reviews INDIE SILVER awards.
Painting by Numbers - An essential book for not getting snookered by fast-talking quants.
I also play viola in community orchestras (and play with a bunch of guitarists), play piano at home just to annoy one of my dogs, taught myself bass guitar late in life, and now compose music as a new avocation in retirement. I’ve designed and taught courses on numerical literacy, the short story, and Joy at the Intersection of Musical Genres (yes, even my tastes in music lie at the hybrids of classical, jazz, rock, and every other category).
A man and his instrument …
Getting ready for a performance.
I’ve given speeches to audiences as large as 5000 and held a book signing at a bookstore near Bucknell University in front of one. Yes, one. I learned later that she had a rep as the half-homeless (unhoused?) town leftist, socialist nut job. I’m happy to tell you about the time I led a panel of five experts in energy to an audience of two sitting in an auditorium which could hold 500.
So, no, I’m not just another old white guy author. I’m a half-Syrian, half-Greek, All-American engineer, writer, quant, musician, teacher, speechgiver, etc. who resides at the intersection of too many circles on the Venn diagram of life.
I’m gonna bet many of you reading this have similar resumes, and attention deficit disorders :).
“Freedom is controlling the narrative” is the tag line for my latest book the brutalist satire novel, Wrequiem at the Red Rocks. All the Venn diagram circles you read here are touched on and satirized in this novel—ethnicity; placed-based caricatures; gender definitions; freedom afforded by power, wealth, and educational status; inherent prejudices; scare tactics used by quants; etc. But most of all, American exceptionalism.
I guess the first narrative I have to control is the one about the old white guy author. The second one I hope people will discover in reading Wrequiem is that the myth of American exceptionalism in all of its guises and forms is alive and well.
And deserving of derision through brutalist satire.
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