Few companies have a clear strategic vision. The problem, say the authors, stems from the strategic-planning process itself, which usually involves preparing a large document, culled from a mishmash of data provided by people with conflicting agendas. That kind of process almost guarantees an unfocused strategy. Instead, companies should design the strategic-planning process by drawing a picture: a strategy canvas. A strategy canvas shows the strategic profile of your industry by depicting the various factors that affect competition. And it shows the strategic profiles of your current and potential competitors as well as your own company's strategic profile--how it invests in the factors of competition and how it might in the future. The basic component of a strategy canvas--the value curve--is a tool the authors created in their consulting work and have written about in previous HBR articles. This article introduces a four-step process for actually drawing and discussing a strategy canvas. Readers will learn how one European financial services company used this process to create a distinct and easily communicable strategy.

The process begins with a visual awakening. Managers compare their business's value curve with competitors' to discover where their strategy needs to change. In the next step--visual exploration--managers do field research on customers and alternative products. At the visual strategy fair, the third step, managers draw new strategic profiles based on field observations and get feedback from customers and peers about these new proposals. Once the best strategy is created from that feedback, it's time for the last step--visual communication. Executives distribute "before" and "after" strategic profiles to the whole company, and only projects that will help move the company closer to the "after" profile are supported.

Professional either have a track record of selling titles and/or have commercial interests such as a seminar business where the book is a component but not the main source of revenue. In the latter case, the author/publisher maybe less concerned with the commercial success of the title but retain a strong desire to produce a quality published product in the traditional sense. This group is likely to understand the publishing business.

Amateurs may have significant misconceptions of the industry and their capacity to be successful. They will require significant education and (possibly) even motivation to complete their “product.” They may develop a personal relationship with the publisher rather than a business relationship and will become more demanding of time and effort than the Professional.

Non-commercial versus commercial could be a choice of the publisher as well as a representation of the commercial potential of the product. For example to a "pragmatist" a book could be a 'give-away' that supports some other aspect of their business and is thus 'non-commercial' but to an amateur the book may be 'non-commercial' because it doesn't have a market. To the customer base of the client their expectation of the commerical merits of their products often did not match reality and this was important for management to recognize.

Most of our customers in the lower left quadrant would place themselves much further to the right on the commercial spectrum than reality would dictate. We also recognized that placing customers into the lower right quadrant could not be planned with a degree of accuracy and depended on the willingness of the client to promote and market their title aggressively. Realistically, we felt it was next to impossible to anticipate success in in this quadrant.

In the upper right (q4), we would most likely find established authors, professional speakers and back-in-print titles. (We didn't look at profitability in this exercise but that would be an obvious additional task).

We then selected a spectrum of key attributes that we believed customers valued: Price, speed, contact, quality, control, product sales, community, education, ease of use, reputation. Using these attributes (which would be confirmed by research later), we attempted to plot how our customers in each segment valued each attribute. Importantly, we understood these drivers to be 'valued' differently by the customers in each segment.

The resulting chart for Pragmatists plotted for the client and one of their competitors looked like this:

Pragmatists: This draft profile suggests key areas of differentiation from one player to the other. The competitor (black line) operates at the top of the chart for the drivers that their customers view as critical and give low consideration (limit time and effort) on those that do not and which don't support their strategy. In my clients case, we believed customers valued education highly but we also knew this aspect of the business cost a lot to deliver.

Dreamers:

We also looked at the 'dreamer' segment and chose a different competitor which had made a conscious decision to build sales volume.

To support this strategy their revenue model was partially driven by unit sales (of the finished book), and they determined that many of their authors did not care about quality in the same way a traditional publisher/ author would. The competitor believed that ‘Dreamers’ were interested in receiving the end product as soon as possible.

In contrast, my client publisher sought to actively engage with the ‘dreamer’ to produce a better end product. Paradoxically, in the case of the competitor the ‘dreamer’ may remain blissfully ignorant but happy, while in the case of my client the customer may be dissatisfied because the process took longer, the interactions with staff were frustrating and the choices overwhelming. Same type of customer - "Dreamer" - but different approaches produce different customer experiences and expectations.

Strategy: As we discussed these 'straw-man' profiles we recognized that for our business there was a lot of revenue in delivering services to the lower left quadrant (q1) if we could get the mix correct. Our task was to understand how to produce that revenue profitably. One obvious solution was to not deliver costly services the author/customer is uninterested in. Over delivering to this segment is pointless which is a philosophy that one of our competitors practiced.

We also recognised that classic business strategy suggests that companies endeavor to move their customers in the direction of the upper right quadrant. In the self-publishing market it would be virtually impossible to turn ‘Dreamers’ into ‘Moneyed’; however, it may be possible to move a small number into ‘lotto winners.’ The assumption would be that these authors have a product with a ‘hook’ that is somehow unique, and they are willing to work actively on the book to improve it and support it in the market. An added bonus would be one if the author was willing/able to publish additional titles. Rather than expend effort building marketing, promotion and editorial services (add-ons) for clients in the lower left one potential strategy would be to expend this effort on the select titles/authors that showed promise in moving these titles/authors to the right along the commercial spectrum.

Using the framework we hashed out over an afternoon, our next step was to confirm the key customer drivers by segment (Professionals, Amateurs) and to plot our position and our competitor's and then identify our ideal profile. Once we defined this ideal profile, we would build a strategy focused on moving the company from the 'old' curve to the 'new' one.

In implementing this approach it is important to recognize that customers dictate and research is likely to identify a new driver and confirm that one or more suggested drivers are not important at all. Substitutions could occur and research should be tailored to uncovering these ‘unknown’ drivers not just confirming the ones the staff identifies.

Lastly, communicating the strategy internally is important and using a visual tool like this strategy map makes this easier. Once the ‘big-picture’ strategy is defined then other tactical aspects of the strategy should be easier to define. This can be both a fun exercise and one critical to the future success of an organization.

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Since she spent years living in between New York City and Alaska, Joan Kane's poetry crisscrosses two vastly different worlds. In this video interview, she described how these two places influenced her new book, "The Cormorant Hunter's Wife."

Kane was one of the ten writers honored at the 25th annual Whiting Writers' Awards last week. GalleyCat prowled the aisles of the 2009 Whiting Awards, interviewing a number of the winners about their writing lives, the recession, and the future of literature. The ten recipients each took home a $50,000 award for their literary efforts.

Here's more about the author: "Kane is Irish and Inupiaq Eskimo, with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University ... In 2009 her play, 'The Gilded Tusk,' won the Anchorage Museum theater contest."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Well, except maybe one: Coming at it from a publishing diversity standpoint, the U.S. book scene is totally broke.

I know some people appreciate the stacks of books fronting every B&N in the country, but not everyone. And I find it hard to believe that the endgame results of this are worthwhile. Namely, the fact that everyone in the country is reading the same dozen books at the same time, and that the vast majority of writers are “mid-list,” struggling to make ends meet, stealing away time to work on their art. (Granted, there is something romantic about the starving artist doing what he/she is doing out of love of literature, but thanks to MFA programs, it seems to me that young writers aren’t looking to create the next literary trend, but find a way to create something as entertaining at TV that can land them a two-book deal.)

As I mentioned earlier, one of the main goals of the Study Trip was to explore ideas for new publishing business models. And with good reason. Over the past four days, I hope that it’s become clear that if we continue down the path that we’re currently on (increased readership for eBooks, which have a max price of $10, which are sold in a handful of different proprietary formats, accelerated price wars for print books, more corporate consolidation in response to duplicated overhead costs, shareholder pressure to achieve 15% profit margins, a globalized book market in which America sells its wares everywhere and only the elite of the select of the few get their books translated and published here, advances that are totally insane for totally crappy books like Sarah Palin’s “memoir,” etc.), I believe that corporate publishing will continue to downsize for years to come in order to get out from under their top-heavy operating costs, and the American literary world will continue—thanks to market pressures and MBA grads—to shift from books as cultural item to books as commercial product. We are essentially bankrupting ourselves of art and ideas in search of profits.

(OK, I’ll temper that grandstanding statement: great books are still being published and purchased. And they always will be. That said, you have to admit that things are trending a certain way. For every Bolano, there are a billion “365 Days of Walking My Dog” type books. That wall off the real literature. And that sucks.)

But the thing about eBooks (which I tried to articulate in another multi-part, overly written—though much funnier—essay that I wrote for the Reykjavik International Book Fair) and any other techno-social developments that shake the foundations of the existing power structure, is that these paradigm shifts open up as many possibilities as they destroy. EBooks make things possible that were never possible before. And for all my love of heavy paperbacks, door-stopping, bag strap breaking, paperback, I can still look at the eBook model, at the way a book I want to publish can suddenly be in the hands of every cellphone user in the world, and get really excited.

I have no idea what the future might bring. What publishing might look like in a decade. What device will win out. What format. What business model. But caveats aside, I feel like the only way to really end this series of posts is to speculate wildly. Most of this stuff is probably pie-in-the-sky, Cubs actually win a World Series, sort of stuff, but well . . . actually, I’m lying: my predictions are more likely than that ever happening. (Sorry Cubs fans! Next year!)

So, in no particular order, here are some concluding statements/thoughts:

• A steep rise in eBook readership will correspond to the adoption of a universal format and in piracy.

This sort of mirrors what happened with digital music and the widespread adoption of the mp3 format. Right now, we have a fragmented eBook landscape overloaded with proprietary formats and a ton of potential eBook readers (like myself) who are holding out for a cool reader that isn’t tied to a particular retailer. I don’t want to duplicate my love-hate relationship with Cingular AT&T when it comes to EBooks. And in addition to blaming eretailers for their file formats, publishers should unite and push for the epub format, for mostly selling eBooks that will work on the Nook, the Kindle, the Sony device. It’s only a matter of time before Google’s love for open source mixed with their tremendous library blows apart all the other formats—in part through a rise in piracy.

It goes without saying that I’m very anti-DRM. I understand why some publishers want to try and find a way to retain this despite the fact that it failed so miserably for the music industry. Especially when 80%+ of their eBook sales revenue is related to a particular author or small set of bestsellers. If those books were unprotected and rampantly pirated in a way that cannibalized print book sales, then the revenue from e-books would be atrociously low.

But I want to take an even more radical position: looking at this from a long-term perspective, I think piracy would be good for eBooks. Not just in the “content deserves to be free, wouldn’t it be great if people were stealing Open Letter books” way. In the way that piracy generates usage, generates interest, gets more people reading more eBooks. And pirates don’t steal everything. This isn’t a on-off sort of game. They might steal some books, but some others, share even more. Regardless, a rise in pirated eBooks will positively correspond to a rise in eBook sales.

• Big Publishing will be slow to adapt and some indie presses will figure out the perfect business model first.

This sort of pro-piracy thing doesn’t go over so well with corporate publishers. They want to protect content. Monetize it. Give out small samples, but never the full book. Going back to an earlier MBA class I took, it’s a pretty commonly held assumption that big companies can’t innovate. They can tweak products, alter distribution methods, make small advances. But radical game-changing advancements come from the little guys. (And Apple.)

Admittedly, coming up with a model for how to successfully publish eBooks (even literary eBooks) isn’t necessarily as revolutionary as other twentieth century advances, but in terms of the overall possibility of making this happen, it’s much easier to envision a smaller, savvier, more nimble indie press with low overhead coming up with a way to cover costs and make money on a mix of sales of $10 ebooks and some printed copies.

I think big publishing will transition, and will get there eventually, but it’ll be a difficult, painful process involving some downsizing, some painful decisions, and a revamping of the company’s focus and infrastructure.

In the meantime, their hold on the industry’s distribution chain will probably loosen. Thanks to Amazon.com, indie presses are already able to reach far more readers than they would if they had to rely solely on bricks-and-mortar stores. Which is—despite any objections one might have to Amazon.com’s perceived business practices—a very good thing. More books available to more people is always a plus. And this will only increase with the rise of eBooks.

And as a result, I think more indie and nonprofit presses will pop up. We’ll start seeing more support from individuals and foundations going to literary publishing houses who are able to better explain their role in today’s book culture. There will be a micropress revolution similar to what’s happened in Argentina.

This isn’t to say that Penguin or Random or Harper will go away, but that the publishing landscape will contain many more top-notch indie presses that can more or less compete with the corporations in terms of recognition, respect, and editorial value.

What happens to a publisher in this era though? I believe their brand and editorial vision will become more and more crucial. As will the ability to market. We already know that marketing has been undergoing a pretty intense evolution from a time when you could rely on newspaper reviews to sell a lot of copies to a time of BzzAgents and proliferating bloggers. This shift will be exacerbated as the industry becomes more and more digital. And more and more concentrated.

Marketing will become more closely tied with a press’s “brand,” which will be a function of their editorial vision. Presses with a tight, carefully curated list will connect with a more avid fanbase (one that can help with word-of-mouth), than will presses with a very diffuse, unfocused list. I wouldn’t be surprised if corporate publishers end up reinventing a lot of imprints in order to more easily give a shape and a reputation to a particular set of books.

Personally, I think this would be a good thing. I know people complain about what’s happened to the record industry, but from an aesthetic perspective, I don’t see any problems. There’s just as much good music available today as there was ten years ago. I’d even be willing to argue that the destruction of the corporate behemoths and the way digital opened up space for more unique, diverse voices (and made it easier to discover these bands) has actually improved the quality of music being made. So maybe the downfall of the giants is actually a good thing . . . (Although Eli Horowitz from McSweeney’s—er, in French, MAC Sweeney’s—was quick to point out that big publishers are doing much better, much more relevant work than the big record labels were doing. Which is totally true and sort of cocks up my theory.)

• Authors, now able to connect with readers directly, will have a lot more choices to make and a lot more power.

No one really takes self-publishing all that seriously. (OK, not “no one.” But not many people I know.) Unless a book has been selected and edited by a particular publishers, and is printed with a legit logo on its spine, it’s all just fun and games. So the idea of authors self-producing eBooks and selling them directly to readers, thus bypassing publishers completely is a bit far-fetched. (Like Cubs, World Series, I know, I know, dead horse, flogging.) That said, for some writers, this will become a reasonable option. Those authors who have very popular blogs, who have developed a loyal fan base willing to shell out $10 (or less) to directly purchase a writer’s book . . . In the end, this could financially work out, especially assuming these author’s will have the same ability as Random to make their eBooks available to any and everyone with an e-reader or a cell phone. For some this will be appealing . . .

Others will start looking at publishers a bit differently. Sure, the biggest advance will frequently win the book, but in evaluating presses, the editorial brand and the press’s digital marketing savvy will definitely come into play. Authors will be able to look at presses in a slightly different way than they do right now, when publishers still hold most of the power and are the only real option to getting your work in front of readers.

I think that a publisher’s brand and editorial vision will help to attract a certain quality of author—even more so than it does now. That as a result, editors will become a bit more publicly recognized. Not that the man on the street will necessarily know who these people are, but that publishers will start promoting their editors as key players in the process of producing quality books. Almost like movie producers. Or something. (Analogies are escaping me . . . it’s been a long day.) Main point is that publishers will see value in their editorial staff, not just in an internal, yes we need good editors way, but as something they can leverage to increase awareness of their product and attract quality authors.

• Bookstores are most likely screwed.

Not sure what else to say here, but unless we institute a fixed book price law (which I would fully support and I’m sure is somewhere on Obama’s list of things to do), it’s going to become more and more difficult for individual bookstores to survive. They will have to adapt as well, becoming something other than a strict retail establishment. There is a space here for a nonprofit model to come into existence, and for local literary centers to take hold. But I’ll leave that for another set of posts . . .

In the end, books will still be written, and a small, devoted group of people will still read them. In some form. Someones will make money on the exchange between artist and consumer and the world will keep spinning. Who knows what things will look like in ten years. It’s an interesting time . . . And a great time to visit Paris.

Thanks again to everyone involved in making last week’s trip possible—it was amazing, intellectually stimulating, and a lot of fun.

GalleyCat has been tracking the stock performance of the major companies that influence the bookselling business. We created this chart with eight publicly-traded publishing stocks hand-picked by our readers--including company name, symbol, current stock price, and price increase or decrease at week's close.

-Name- -Symbol- -Last price- -Change-
The McGraw-Hill Co. MHP 29.32 -0.14
Books-A-Million, Inc. BAMM 8.15 0.23
Borders Group, Inc. BGP 2.06 -0.05
Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN 126.2 5.59
Barnes & Noble, Inc. BKS 17.05 0.18
Wiley John & Sons Inc. JW.A 36.5 0.22
Scholastic Corporation SCHL 25.3 0.09
News Corporation NWS 14.15 0.04
Google Inc. GOOG 551.1 2.45
Apple Inc. AAPL 194.34 0.31
Sony Corporation SNE 28.84 0.11

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to Publishers Weekly, Triumph will spend a considerable amount of money sending the short book to New York City bookstores via messenger service on Saturday morning. The publisher is a Random House imprint with offices in Chicago.

Here's more from the article: "Mitch Rogatz, Triumph Books publisher, explained that the press had put together two books--one done completely in-house on the Phillies, and the other done in collaboration with the New York Post on the Yankees. A printer also was lined up to go to work as soon as the last game ended...the book on the Phillies has been shelved--for now."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The 1963 comic was penned by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby. According to Digital Spy, the auction sold 3,000 comics for more than one million dollars, auctioning off an epic collection of comics inherited by an anonymous relative of a deceased comic book collector.

Here's more from the article: "According to Tina Weiman of Mound City Auctions, it is unknown whether the original owner knew how much the comics are worth. 'I don't think he necessarily knew the value of them,' she said. 'I don't know when he looked at them last. I know that that were pulled out from underneath the basement steps.'"

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you're just looking for an excuse to write on walls - or know your customers would love to: IdeaPaint.

Ugliest? Sure. But some of these qualify for so-ugly-it's-cute - although I don't think I'll be trading my Civic for a CitiCar.

If you thought the Harry Potter parties of 2007 were impressive, check out BTW's photo gallery from bookstore Graveyard Book parties.

Speaking of holiday events, Buy Books for the Holidays is gearing up for another season, and they've extended a special invitation to independent bookstores.

Would Paul Revere have tweeted? That's not exactly the question considered at Experience: The Blog, but now I want him to join the company of HalfPintIngalls, BozDickens, and Edgar_Allan_Poe.

Also, to address the perennial question of practical uses of social media, I present Josh Christie's recommendations. (He did not, however, recommend any $1,200 books.)

John Mesjak has a roundup of the regional association holiday catalogs.

If you were hoping to set youngest-employee records - well, you're too late. Martina Kashkashian has already granted her first interview about the world of book-buying.

At Chasing Ray, check out some excellent underground photos by Julia Solis. (Who's up for some forgotten subway exploration?)

The book industry made it on TV a bit more than usual this week, between a NewsHour segment featuring Kassia Krozser and Lev Grossman, and then John Grisham on Today.

We’re on page 98 as part of a list of the top 15 Best Websites for Wasting Time.

OH. My. GOD. Could I be more flattered?! HOLY HELL.

We’re on a list with Daily Danza, CakeWrecks, There I Fixed It, and 1Bruce1—and Lifetime, Wow? I may swoon.

Here’s a scan of the list, should you like 14 other ways to suck the time out of your day. I’m already working my way through the list. Thanks, Marie Claire!

Taylor shared his experiences working with hundreds of imprisoned authors and creative writing mentors. The writing program will be celebrated on Monday at Breakout: Voices from Inside--a fundraising event with appearances by Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, and John Turturro.

Here's an excerpt from the interview: "[Some inmates] can't get their hands on pencil and paper, but still feel the urge and desire to express themselves in writing ... That's the thing that's really moving, when you see the desire is so strong in people. We believe that writing is a skill, and it can be practiced. Unlike many skills, writing well is useful. And it's useful in almost every avenue of life: employment, education, and daily life. It's also a skill that generates other skills."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Literary criticism in the 21st century: "Before we knew it, the Age of Margarine was upon us – not golden, but bright yellow, and full of suspicious adulterants."

• Positive results of a book clearout, plus additional bookshelf porn.

• Positive reader reviews for sale in bulk.

• I'd be more interested in the original scroll version of On the Road if it looked like this.

• The beneficial effects of hiring an agent: "The book, formerly titled Every Day I Know Less and Less: Postcards From the New Times Square, has been sold to Denise Oswald of Soft Skull as Last of the Live Nude Girls."

And no romance novel is complete without a fight scene, right? Right! Becky sent me this one: it’s impeccable. All sequences of dramatic action should be so intense. And full of homoerotic tension.

Note, if you will: COPIOUS MAN TITTY for Friday Videos, in both cases! WOO!

Told with palpable anger and scant sympathy for its characters, this is a powerful novel but I confess that I struggled to really appreciate it

When Kiran Desai's Inheritance Of Loss won the 2006 Booker Prize, a few eyebrows were raised. Although she had a famous mother (Anita Desai) who had herself been on the Booker shortlist three times, Kiran was relatively unknown. Comparatively few had read her book, and the bookies had her down at fifth or sixth favourite. So far so normal – Hilary Mantel's victory this year is the first time I can remember a favourite winning. What was unusual that following on from its success the book was subject to protests and book-burning.

Sadly, it wasn't fans of fellow shortlisted author Edward St Aubyn's Mothers' Milk stoking the bonfires, but the outraged residents of Kalimpong. The novel tells of a 1980s rebellion of the ethnic Nepalese in the Himalayan town, who were fed up (in Desai's words) of being "treated like the minority in the place where they were the majority". As the book details, the rebellion was bloody and chaotic. Its fictional portrayal must have hit a raw nerve, especially since Desai herself was, as one man put it at the time, "an outsider" who made the "whole town … strange." She particularly seems to have offended those of Nepalese descent who thought themselves described as little better than thieves and menial fools.

There's perhaps a small grain of truth to these claims. Desai certainly doesn't glorify Kalimpong's non-Indian majority. But the irony is that they get off lightly compared to everyone else. As she teases out her multiple narrative we meet over-privileged Indians who put on absurd English airs; racist, ignorant and distinctly under-intelligent English people; Indians in America who use Gandhi's image to make money while exploiting other Indians; and Indians in America who allow themselves to be exploited. Also, there are the Americans themselves, whose capitalist empire is perhaps the cruellest thing in the book. Nearly every character she focuses on is at some stage degraded and humiliated. Nearly every character also degrades and humiliates others. The "loss" of the title is physical, spiritual, and inescapable.

It is in short a singularly acerbic novel. One that does not win friends by flattery. Even so, it's possible to see why the 2006 judges were won over. Desai's anger, for a start, is a force to be reckoned with. The cold, controlled rage with which she describes – say – an Indian in England watching a countryman take a beating and turn and flee, makes for occasionally heart-stopping reading. The indignation that builds over the course of the book, meanwhile, is overwhelming.

But there are also gentler pleasures. As much as anything this is a descriptive tour de force. There are fine evocations of the clean beauty of the Himalayas, the all-pervading dank of the monsoon, huge crumbling colonial mansions, crammed basements where bed shortages force immigrant labourers to sleep in shifts. Her prose is strong and vivid and generally a delight to read.

I say generally because occasionally Desai steps over the boundary between enjoyably rich and horribly cloying. Take the following, for instance: "a simple blind sea creature, but refusing to be refused … odd: insistent, but cowardly; pleading but pompous." That is how Desai renders a male "organ". There's also a whiff of sixth-form straining for profundity. A man who is blinded disappears "entirely inside the alcohol that has always given him solace". And when a light blows it diminishes "to a filament, tender as Edison's first miracle held between delicate pincers of wire in the glass globe of the bulb".

I also failed to engage with the book's main narratives. The politics and history are fascinating, but I felt dragged along the path Desai weaves through them. I had little sense of urgency or involvement. The central strand relating to the failed love between a privileged Indian girl and her Gorkha tutor, though refreshingly bitter rather than sweet, I found particularly flat. The female half of the equation (Sai) is the one character that Desai allows to escape with any dignity and the only one for whom she pushes any claim for respect and sympathy (rather than pity). Yet she too remained for me unreal, unformed, mildly annoying and largely uninteresting. I didn't care for her travails or anything else. So it was a book I admired rather than liked.

Yet I'm more aware than ever that these are subjective judgements. My basic objection is little more than that the book isn't to my personal taste. But is it to yours? And what else am I missing that the Booker judges saw. All comments will be even more gratefully received than usual, since they'll help inform John Mullan's final column of the month on readers' responses to the book.

It's sobering to think about how small the world of American letters will look without him

He's just published a new novel, and another is finished and due for publication next year, but the memorialisation of Philip Roth has already begun. The towering American novelist has recently had his works published by the Library of America, giving him an immortal status usually reserved for dead authors. At age 76, his birthdays are now "commemorated" rather than celebrated, with his achievements discussed by awestruck admirers. And Roth himself has been batting off curious journalists probing into his recent meditations on death in The Dying Animal, Everyman and Exit Ghost – are these novels an attempt to come to terms with his own mortality, they ask?

But in a sense, those aren't the most interesting questions. Many writers turn instinctively in their later years to the bewilderments of old age. Among Roth's contemporaries, Saul Bellow dealt with the humiliations of dying in his final novel Ravelstein; while John Updike's Seek My Face was as much concerned with ageing as art history. In Roth's case, this shift resulted in one of his best novels. Devoid of the humour which usually leavens his narrators, the stripped down and deadly serious voice in Everyman was dense, lyrical and overwhelmingly powerful.

And this points to the more urgent question that will crop up increasingly in coming years. Despite Roth wanting to have them all shot, critics will be asking: can we imagine a world without Roth? "I can't see an American writer coming along who is replacing Roth," says Jay Prosser, who teaches American literature at the University of Leeds. "He writes with his ear – his novels are completely driven by his voice." There is a singularity of voice in Roth's work which is hard to find elsewhere. The current crop of high-profile American writers – such as Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer and the late David Foster Wallace – have raised technicality to an art form, but it would be hard to argue that they drive their novels home with the same ferocious intensity.

And a piece of American history will also fall into the sea when Roth goes. Now the last one standing from the big-hitting male American writers who shot to fame alongside him, Roth came of age when writing the Great American Novel was still an embodiment of the American dream. Tom Wolfe wrote in 1972 that the novel was "one of the last of those superstrokes, like finding gold, through which an American could, overnight, utterly tranform his destiny".

Now that novels have to compete in the attention economy along with everything else, younger American writers have found themselves emerging on lower pedestals. David Foster Wallace argued in the 1990s that American fiction writers under 40 operate in a media-saturated realm which separates them from the likes of Roth, Updike and Bellow. It could well be that American novelists never again achieve the same level of mythology as Roth.

It's Debby this morning, just returned from Bouchercon, where Sisters in Crime sponsored a terrific seminar, titled SinC into Great Writing. The headline speaker was literary agent Donald Maas, who gave so many great tips on improving our WIP's that I couldn’t write fast enough. Here are some of his suggestions about how to create a stronger antagonist.

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Leo Babauta of ZenHabits.com recently writes in his post The Habit Change Cheatsheet: 29 Ways to Successfully Ingrain a Behavior:

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