Ron Seybold, former newspaperman, great writer, and the first editor insane enough to pay me for my prose, came to the San Francisco Bay Area. Ron and I caught up on our suspect life and times. Among other nefarious activities, Ron Seybold is conducting writer’s workshops back in Austin, Texas.
We invested some of our visitation hours discussing the publishing business and how for writers it is Hell’s Own Gauntlet. Publishing has become such an unforgivable mess that on the surface it appears to be a government program, though this might be a slight to the government.
The problem for writers, especially for the unestablished variety, is that the publishing business is littered with gatekeepers whose mission is to keep you from being published. Since there are inherent risks and costs for a publisher to print a few thousand books, evolution has dictated that the industry grow a number of natural defenses … and some unnatural like literary agents.
The first gatekeeper is the agent. Over time, publishers have moved the cost of slush pile reading onto the backs of agents. This may be a business necessity as the cost of hiring a room full of nearly amateur editors to read every hack writers manuscript is not inconsiderable. By ignoring unsolicited manuscripts, publishers have created an industry of freelance junior editors who accept all the risk.
But this causes a problem. Whereas a writer could in years past target a publisher who printed books similar to what a writer had penned — and thus have some assurance of a sympathetic potential buyer — writers must now play hit-or-miss with agents (unless you are extremely savvy and can backtrack similar books through their submission genealogy back to the original agent). An agent will reject a book if they simply do not have contacts within a simpatico publisher.
Strike one.
If you are lucky enough to find a sober agent who also rubs elbows (or other anatomical apparatus) with an appropriate publisher, then you face the internal gatekeepers, who are varied and vicious. Editors will second guess your prose. Market evaluators will second guess sales volumes. Senior editors will second guess their three martini lunches and between rounds reject your opus because they dislike the color of your hair. And unless you can wow them with your ability to market the book on their behalf, they may walk away at any point thereafter.
Strike two.
Under the nearly incalculable odds that you find an agent with multiple functioning brain cells who’s is in bed with a publisher willing to risk stockholder profits on your manuscript, then you face the dreaded channel. Gatekeepers stand guard between the printing presses and Barns and Noble’s shelves. Distributors must agree to carry and stockpile your book, risking carrying and holding costs before introducing your tome to retailers.
Strike three.
Retailers can of course reject anything distributors dump on their desks. The large chains have their own market insights, and routinely reject carrying books because they believe the market for them is weak. You may have whelped the next “War and Peace”, but if 90% of the retailer’s in-store traffic comes from those hungering for the next Harry Potter or Ann Coulter work, then you can be pushed aside simply for expediency and quarterly sales volume and profit sake. And whatever you do, do not allow the image of Harry and Ann linger in the same regions of your mind … it ain’t that pretty at all.
Strike four (so much for that metaphor).
Finally comes the media, without whom few people may ever hear about your work (and herein is why every writer should learn the art of creating buzz through traditional and Internet mediums as they may well have to create their own demand). From political experience and working with reporters of all spots and stripes, I can attest that what appears in print or on the web is largely a reflection of their biases and preconceived notions about what the world needs to know. You lay prostrate before the media, spun 180 degrees for added discomfort.
Strike five. We’re all out.
If this seems like an insurmountable hill for a new writer, it may well be. These gatekeepers were accidentally designed to keep millions and millions of incapable and incompetent prose pimps from wasting the time, money, and three martini lunches of the publishers, and the bottom line of book retailers who run on feather thin margins. I can only explain the unintelligible effluvium found on bookstore shelves as a sign that the system does not always work, or does not work well.
Keep writing anyway. You are not writing because it will make you rich (odds are you will starve to death as a writer). You write because you have to. So damn the gatekeepers. Mount your word processor, tip your pen lance-like, and charge headlong toward the gatekeepers as if they were so many windmills.
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