Publishing: Let’s Make it About Writers For a Change
Thought experiment time.
Pretend for a moment that the nation’s publishers met Godfather-style in a smoke-filled room somewhere high atop midtown Sixth Avenue. Everyone is there: The Random House overlords; the Simon & Schuster bosses; the charming and benevolent folk who run McGraw-Hill. All the other bigwigs. In the corner there’s a nice dairy tray with lox and whitefish, but no one’s paying attention to that. The business at hand is way too life and death. The industry heads agree – yes, they’ve been flooding the marketplace with too many books. Too many authors for too many niches and too few eyes.
So they’ve reached a decision. They’re tightening the reins and establishing what amounts to a basement. Let the Internet have its laissez faire free-for-all. That’s what it’s intended for, damn it. But the ink-and-binding set will move in the opposite direction: only credentialed, worthy writers get to publish under commercial banners. Word tumbles down to the editorial gatekeepers that, yes, or rather no, there will be no more taking chances on just anyone’s two bit thesis. Err on the side of exclusion. If something looks like it should be relegated to the vanity presses, it should.
“We can’t afford to take chances on a slush pile’s silt. The draw bridges are rising up, and we’re taking the express elevator to the upper floors of our ivory tower.”
So here’s the question: is there anything wrong with this?
Sure it’s elitist. But we’re evolving into a culture that can allow for a healthy dose of selective elitism when needed. You aren’t Spielberg? So what. Throw that video of your toddler angrily dropping Fuck-words on the family cat onto YouTube. If it’s compelling, a few million people will watch it. Or maybe they’ll prefer your neighbor’s video of Grandpa belching out the national anthem.
But you’ll be better off, either way, because the chance of someone in Singapore seeing your adventures in auteurism is much higher than if you decided to try for a dozen years to secure foreign distribution through Universal.
It’s an extreme and not completely analogous example, but there’s truth to it. Despite all those fancy technological advancements and truncated attention spans leading publishing gradually down the path to the dinosaur graveyard, books matter. They still have cachet. Having your name on the spine right above Knopf or St. Martin’s or Penguin-Putnam still means something to *you as a writer (*did I say me?).
But walk into any Barnes & Noble and look on those overflowing tables. Just gander at some of the people “playing author” right now. It’s one thing to be an expert in a particular field and have a little assistance, whether from a ghostwriter or a co-author, like many in business do. But some of these books are midlife crises with acknowledgments, an index and a marketing budget.
Just because you’re good at one thing, doesn’t mean that you’re a natural in another. It seems true in the book biz. Some people have compelling stories that should be told. Most people do not. And the filters are broken.
There’s a reason we call them vanity presses. They appeal to those self-absorbed bits of every person’s soul, or the bulbs that light whenever you pick up Tolstoy and murmur with your eyes ablaze, “Shit. I could do that.” So go ahead. Publish. Do it independently. Write up your masterpiece, put it on Amazon or in the back of your van, and take it to the people at a state fair. If it’s good it’ll sell—you just have to make them open it up.
The home-schooled child who wrote that dragon book proved just that. More likely, what you wrote is really just for your friends and associates…it’s not good and will not sell. At which point . . . think about giving up. Because just like it’s not every morning a shower karaoke balladeer winds up on Sony BMG, not every halfwit who can “keyboard” (type) and spare time to jot it down, should wind up clogging an already ridiculously congested publishing pipeline.
[I will add that just because you aren’t a pro writer doesn’t mean you need to stop reading books and posting fantastic blog comments….]
