Advertisments

Much Ado About Publishing

The Nice Guy Behind Evil Wylie: A Conversation with Andrew Shaffer

by Nina L. Diamond

It's never a good idea to confuse a writer with his characters.

For instance, if you think that the writer behind Evil Wylie and Emperor Franzen, the popular Twitter publishing parody characters who've gotten so much media attention, is some hyper, snarky, over-bearing hipster, you'd be wrong.

To invoke a Superman cliche, author, humor writer, and book reviewer Andrew Shaffer is a mild-mannered...

Well, actually, the Superman reference does come close when describing one of his characters: Emperor Franzen, a parody of controversial best-selling novelist and Oprah book club pick Jonathan Franzen, doesn't wear a cape, but does sport an eerie hooded cloak.

On the other hand, Evil Wylie, a parody of the even more controversial agent Andrew Wylie, doesn't wear anything, or have one hand, let alone another, because he's just a disembodied skull.

Back in September, in the midst of the media coverage of these parody characters and the serious publishing concerns they so amusingly addressed, I snagged the first interview with their then-unidentified creator for my Much Ado About Publishing humor column. We did the interview by e-mail and I did not know his identity.

Not long after, in character as Emperor Franzen, he wore a hooded cloak to a Jonathan Franzen book signing in New York, and when approached by a Mediabistro correspondent, he ended up revealing his identity in an interview for a short article in the media online publication's GalleyCat column.

When I read that Evil Wylie and Emperor Franzen were actually Andrew Shaffer, I was shocked. Andrew and I had tweeted back and forth a little, and he'd obviously taken great care to make sure that no one would suspect him.

He'd held back his humor and clever publishing industry jabs, saving those for his characters' tweets.

I held him to his promise that we'd do another interview, for the first feature-length article. This time, we'd do the interview on the phone, and, this time, he'd be talking as the out-of-the-character-closet creator of Evil Wylie and Emperor Franzen.



Andrew Shaffer (who tweets @andrewtshaffer) 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 HarperPerennial.

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 says that his ego-run-amuck Emperor Franzen character isn't a swipe at the author, but merely a vehicle to address literary, publishing, and media issues.

"I'm not making fun of Jonathan Franzen," he says, "but of the media hype surrounding him."

The excessive media coverage of Franzen's latest novel, Freedom, led to a big public debate about literary versus commercial fiction, and about how male authors get more reviews and coverage than female authors.

Ironically, Shaffer says that "if Jonathan Franzen were a woman, Freedom might be considered 'chick lit.'"

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, HarperPerennial did want a book based on the philosopher idea.

Q: Will any of the parodies you post on your EvilReads blog end up in a book?

A: I doubt it. It's its own thing. By the time it went into a book it would be pretty dated. Some of the parodies are dated the minute they're put online. And 18 months later, it's not fresh. Its really hard to pull off an entire book of humor without a unified theme.

Q: Has being Evil Wylie and Emperor Franzen changed the trajectory of your career?

A: It has in that it has allowed me to say some things I wanted to say that I didn't feel I could say, and to be a little more of myself. I was concerned that I'd written a book about philosophers , so I'd have to put on a tweed jacket and give off an air of someone who knows philosophy. Try to be someone I wasn't. By doing Evil Wylie, I could show that I have sarcastic parts of my personality. I didn't want to be part of the snark that goes around on the internet and knock everything that's on a pedestal. I didn't want to be lumped in with that.

Q: Will you be doing anything else with Evil Wylie?

A: I've spun it off from Twitter into a blog. There are some things that may come out of that. I'm working on The Little Women/Moby Dick parody as a full book. I don't know where it will go yet, and I don't know what name I'll publish it under. I could publish it under my own name. A lot of those conversations will have to happen with a publisher."

Q: How long will you tweet as Evil Wylie and Emperor Franzen?

A. I don't have an answer. I think people got burned out on Jonathan Franzen. It isn't as relevant.

Q: Will the characters let you know when it's time for them to go? Evil Wylie has more flexibility to comment on the industry than Emperor Franzen.

A: Emperor Franzen is a character of an arrogant writer. Great artists are usually self-deprecating. You never hear the real Jonathan Franzen say (the kinds of things Emperor Franzen says), and if he comes close, they say, 'Can you believe what he said?'

Q: You've been Emperor Franzen not just on Twitter, but out and about.

A: I've gone out in public with the cloak on. Not recently but I did wear a mask to the Spiderman premiere on Broadway. My wife and I were dressed up in Spiderman gear and we were the only ones dressed up. There was a photo of us in the New York Daily News.

Q: Did you think you'd be the only ones dressed up in the theater?

A: I had an idea that there probably wouldn't be that many people dressed up. I wore a mask and tights in a Spiderman outfit. She was wearing a Spiderman dress.

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.


* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

Follow Nina on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/@ninatypewriter

Become a "fan" on Nina's Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/NinaL.DiamondFanPage

---