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msagaraI assume that everyone has read this very unhappy rant. I know that a lot of people have commented on it, and I wasn't going to, but I started a response to someone on my flist and realized that it was long. Very long.
There are agents who blog regularly who have, at one point or another in their blogs, said "I loved this book but I don't think I could sell it". Sometimes they take longer to say it. Sometimes it's that blunt. One, I can't remember who, thought a book could be published, but it would not be worth the money to her to take this person on as a client (because it would go to a small press, and there's very little money for just as much, or in fact more, effort).
I think people like the aggrieved literary writer who thinks agents are basically strangling the field in their grasping search for money fastened onto those comments; I don't think she understood that editors also make the exact same decision: Loved this book. Don't think it will sell. Must pass.
Money is part of the business, because if it weren't, we'd call it something else, like, say, hobby. Money is therefore a large part of the decision to publish. But it is a very subjective business. What's changed so much is that the market has become much narrower because where there used to be 50 large publishers there are now really half a dozen, owned by larger corporations, who are focused on more immediate results.
Back in the age of dinosaurs, when I was still talking to two of my sales reps and managing the bookstore, I was told that an author needs time to build -- they felt the optimum was 5 titles on the shelves, because that gave the author a visible presence. This had been their experience, and they were in their 50s; it was what they knew, and what they had seen work. They watched for momentum, for some gain between books, but they didn't expect instant results.
Things have changed a lot since then. You might still have to write 5 books -- but there's a very good chance that they will, serially, be out of print or at least off all shelves before the next one comes out if the first one doesn't sell well enough. You frequently won't get five books worth of traction or build. You are now trying to hit hard enough the first time out that you can keep going; you might have to change your name and start out "new" again.
What people like this author don't clearly understand is that this is a business. I know published authors who I think are brilliant, and their lack of sales kills their ability to get further books published. It makes me weep because I would buy them. It makes me grind my teeth and feel like there's an enormous sucking vacuum that turns a blind eye to beauty and perfection ...
But I, and maybe two thousand people would devotedly buy their work. And that, in this market, is not enough for major publishers. It is enough for small presses, and I do think the small presses in many cases are flourishing. But in theory the overhead for a small press, along with the expectations, are more modest--as are the advances they can afford to pay.
I think it's a viable model; I am not trying to dis small presses. But it is unlikely that a small press editor (who is usually the publisher) is going to be "let go" because the sales of his acquisitions did not live up to the expectations of owners who are not actually people with a lot of experience about books.
So: I think it's absolutely true that editors and agents do pass on things they like, or like a lot, for purely financial reasons.
What the author doesn't really understand is that they don't have a choice.
We can write for the love of it. There are things I've written that I will never sell, or never try to sell (mostly poetry). We can do whatever we want in the playground of our own minds. We can share these or not as we see fit, and we can give in to the raw compulsion to write things that resonate with personal meaning to no one but ourselves. That's the art. We can even love those words.
But we do this on our own time. Most of us have other jobs which sustain us while we create.
Editors are paid to make their decisions with someone else's money. And they all have some experience with the bitter disappointment of a much loved novel that failed to sell; they grow a sense of what will--or what won't--work in the market, or work with the tools they have (marketing, sales force, etc.). They are expected to use someone else's money wisely; they are not expected to lose it.
Agents -- to get back to her main point -- are trying to sell books to these editors. Therefore the agents are trying to sell books to people who are already focused on commercial viability, because that's their job.
I do not know anyone who is trying to make a living writing poetry. Prose of a certain type seems, to me, to be increasingly hard to sell, given its attrition on shelves these days. Yes, we can write it. Yes, we can perfect it. Yes, we can make it shiny and balanced and resonant, and we can work into it a deep and startling set of metaphors that can be slowly teased out by readers who have the patience and the desire; we can play with structure, fracturing it, putting it together in spirals or fractals so that the themes are an echo of the structure. But if we can't somehow figure out how to also make it accessible and compelling and immediate to a broader spectrum of people, it doesn't matter how good it is. It really doesn't. Because "good/bad" is subjective.
In my experience behind a bookseller's desk, I will say flat out that most people who don't write don't really care all that much about the word-for-word writing. They care about the story. They care about being able to follow the story. If they say something is garbage or crap, they're talking about faults in construction: the characters switch personalities between chapters and do things that nominally sane people would never do. But they're not talking about the felicity of word, of the power and flow of language, of the subtlety of structure -- they're talking about story.
When writers start out, we start out writing because (for most of us) reading was so incredibly important, and we loved books as if they were mute gods. We write what we love. We put everything we have into the first book.
And frankly what we often have is a lack of competence, a lack of craft, and a lack of understanding.
But we think that because we loved a certain book that was hugely respected and successful, and because we love the one we're writing... other people will love it, too. And it's painful and heartbreaking when we come face to face with reality: It's not so. It just isn't.
Some of us will then pick up our words and try to figure out how we failed our story because, you know, we're stubborn and we still love it. We assume that we have failed to communicate that story well enough, have failed to bring the right parts of it to light, have failed to make explicit what we implicitly know: this story is good, damn it. I just need to tell it the right way. Which, clearly, I didn't do this time.
But some people have funny reactions to failure, possibly in the same way people have funny reactions to any rejection in matters of the heart. They can't or won't accept that they've failed this time because their own love for their work blinds them; the failure, the explanation for the inexplicable, must lie elsewhere. In this case, it's money, obviously; that must be it.
Which is sort of sad, slightly embarrassing, and in the end more worthy -- for me -- of pity than mockery or anger.
ETF lack of quotes in cut tag
There are agents who blog regularly who have, at one point or another in their blogs, said "I loved this book but I don't think I could sell it". Sometimes they take longer to say it. Sometimes it's that blunt. One, I can't remember who, thought a book could be published, but it would not be worth the money to her to take this person on as a client (because it would go to a small press, and there's very little money for just as much, or in fact more, effort).
I think people like the aggrieved literary writer who thinks agents are basically strangling the field in their grasping search for money fastened onto those comments; I don't think she understood that editors also make the exact same decision: Loved this book. Don't think it will sell. Must pass.
Money is part of the business, because if it weren't, we'd call it something else, like, say, hobby. Money is therefore a large part of the decision to publish. But it is a very subjective business. What's changed so much is that the market has become much narrower because where there used to be 50 large publishers there are now really half a dozen, owned by larger corporations, who are focused on more immediate results.
Back in the age of dinosaurs, when I was still talking to two of my sales reps and managing the bookstore, I was told that an author needs time to build -- they felt the optimum was 5 titles on the shelves, because that gave the author a visible presence. This had been their experience, and they were in their 50s; it was what they knew, and what they had seen work. They watched for momentum, for some gain between books, but they didn't expect instant results.
Things have changed a lot since then. You might still have to write 5 books -- but there's a very good chance that they will, serially, be out of print or at least off all shelves before the next one comes out if the first one doesn't sell well enough. You frequently won't get five books worth of traction or build. You are now trying to hit hard enough the first time out that you can keep going; you might have to change your name and start out "new" again.
What people like this author don't clearly understand is that this is a business. I know published authors who I think are brilliant, and their lack of sales kills their ability to get further books published. It makes me weep because I would buy them. It makes me grind my teeth and feel like there's an enormous sucking vacuum that turns a blind eye to beauty and perfection ...
But I, and maybe two thousand people would devotedly buy their work. And that, in this market, is not enough for major publishers. It is enough for small presses, and I do think the small presses in many cases are flourishing. But in theory the overhead for a small press, along with the expectations, are more modest--as are the advances they can afford to pay.
I think it's a viable model; I am not trying to dis small presses. But it is unlikely that a small press editor (who is usually the publisher) is going to be "let go" because the sales of his acquisitions did not live up to the expectations of owners who are not actually people with a lot of experience about books.
So: I think it's absolutely true that editors and agents do pass on things they like, or like a lot, for purely financial reasons.
What the author doesn't really understand is that they don't have a choice.
We can write for the love of it. There are things I've written that I will never sell, or never try to sell (mostly poetry). We can do whatever we want in the playground of our own minds. We can share these or not as we see fit, and we can give in to the raw compulsion to write things that resonate with personal meaning to no one but ourselves. That's the art. We can even love those words.
But we do this on our own time. Most of us have other jobs which sustain us while we create.
Editors are paid to make their decisions with someone else's money. And they all have some experience with the bitter disappointment of a much loved novel that failed to sell; they grow a sense of what will--or what won't--work in the market, or work with the tools they have (marketing, sales force, etc.). They are expected to use someone else's money wisely; they are not expected to lose it.
Agents -- to get back to her main point -- are trying to sell books to these editors. Therefore the agents are trying to sell books to people who are already focused on commercial viability, because that's their job.
I do not know anyone who is trying to make a living writing poetry. Prose of a certain type seems, to me, to be increasingly hard to sell, given its attrition on shelves these days. Yes, we can write it. Yes, we can perfect it. Yes, we can make it shiny and balanced and resonant, and we can work into it a deep and startling set of metaphors that can be slowly teased out by readers who have the patience and the desire; we can play with structure, fracturing it, putting it together in spirals or fractals so that the themes are an echo of the structure. But if we can't somehow figure out how to also make it accessible and compelling and immediate to a broader spectrum of people, it doesn't matter how good it is. It really doesn't. Because "good/bad" is subjective.
In my experience behind a bookseller's desk, I will say flat out that most people who don't write don't really care all that much about the word-for-word writing. They care about the story. They care about being able to follow the story. If they say something is garbage or crap, they're talking about faults in construction: the characters switch personalities between chapters and do things that nominally sane people would never do. But they're not talking about the felicity of word, of the power and flow of language, of the subtlety of structure -- they're talking about story.
When writers start out, we start out writing because (for most of us) reading was so incredibly important, and we loved books as if they were mute gods. We write what we love. We put everything we have into the first book.
And frankly what we often have is a lack of competence, a lack of craft, and a lack of understanding.
But we think that because we loved a certain book that was hugely respected and successful, and because we love the one we're writing... other people will love it, too. And it's painful and heartbreaking when we come face to face with reality: It's not so. It just isn't.
Some of us will then pick up our words and try to figure out how we failed our story because, you know, we're stubborn and we still love it. We assume that we have failed to communicate that story well enough, have failed to bring the right parts of it to light, have failed to make explicit what we implicitly know: this story is good, damn it. I just need to tell it the right way. Which, clearly, I didn't do this time.
But some people have funny reactions to failure, possibly in the same way people have funny reactions to any rejection in matters of the heart. They can't or won't accept that they've failed this time because their own love for their work blinds them; the failure, the explanation for the inexplicable, must lie elsewhere. In this case, it's money, obviously; that must be it.
Which is sort of sad, slightly embarrassing, and in the end more worthy -- for me -- of pity than mockery or anger.
ETF lack of quotes in cut tag
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 03:52 am (UTC)