Alone Again

The lone wolf is a different animal from the bison in his great herds

In ‘The Trackless Wild’ on 2008.02.24, I wrote about the Lone Gunman, the talesman of today who writes outside the traditional publishing markets. But in my usual pedantic way I felt I had to define terms, explore history (of which I was mainly guessing and theorizing) and along the way I never said in good terms what I really wanted to say.

Here, then, I’ll try a second time.

What I want to do is contrast my own reactions and approach to tale-telling when I was working to sell my books in the commercial marketplace, and today as an outside agent.

A Chain of Walls

The world of commercial publishing places several walls between the talesman and his readers. The first wall is of agents, for few publishers today can afford the time to read all the writers who hope to have their tales published. So the publishers won’t look at a manuscript unless it has been passed on to them by someone they can trust. In a few cases, this can be an author they publish. If a popular author reads a tale by a newcomer and likes it, he might pass it on to his publisher and say, ‘take a look at this.’ The editors at the publisher will read the manuscript as a favor to the popular author.

Writers don’t have a lot of time to read the manuscripts of newcomers either, so this happens rarely. Most of the time the new writer has to interest an agent in looking over his sample, then if the sample is good enough, the completed manuscript. But agents are also swamped for time; time is the great limiting factor here, the true choke-point.

So the first wall the would-be writer faces is the agent. He must get an agent’s approval to pass this wall.

(There has lately arisen a bank of small publishers, most of whom specialize in a certain kind of writing, and these small publishers will read unagented manuscripts. They are more and more the face of commercial publishing to new writers, but they are not what we the reading public usually think of when we think of publishers. The world of publishing used to be all small houses even at the large publishing centers of the world, but in America over the past generation corporate mergers and acquisitions have winnowed the field of big New York publishers to half a dozen or so big-time players with corporate connections to ‘big sister’ media such as radio, television, and film.)

The second wall the writer faces is the publisher. The publisher has an editorial board, and a number of readers, who are paid very little for all the work they do. Publishing still persists in having a sort of glamour for those youths of a literary bent, who love words and study the language and literature in university. Publishing pays them, therefore, both in salary and in glamour and, I suppose, in dreams, for every dewy-eyed novice in the publishing house dreams of discovering a new voice, a new genius, a new contributor to world literature. Because he is getting payment in these three coinages, the actual cash money the reader gets is small, and the amount of work he is called on to do is great. He is expected to take manuscripts home with him and work nights and week-ends too. But there are, again, only 168 hours in a week.

Within this publishing ‘wall’ are a few smaller walls. The manuscript of the total stranger to the publisher will find itself first with a reader. If the reader likes the manuscript he will pass it along with a recommendation to an editor. But if the editor finds the manuscript is poor, he will be unhappy with his reader. ‘Why did you make me waste my time on this?’ he will ask. So we find a bias in the reader in favor of rejection. This bias, though it may be subtle, we will find at all the small walls in the publishing house.

If an editor does like the manuscript his reader has passed on to him, he must then decide if he likes it enough. The decision here starts to move away from the intrinsic qualities of the tale, and into considerations of profit and loss. Any given publisher can only put out to market so many titles a year. Each title eats the firm’s time and money. Each title represents a calculated bet at the great casino of the world of bookselling. Thus, the editors want to place those bets that stand the best chance of paying off. They want to offer booksellers a list of titles each month that will sell the best, and bring profits to the house over time. These are complicated decisions.

I will offer only a brief sketch of some of these considerations. What has been selling well this season or year, stands a good chance of selling well next season or year. But tastes do change so we must be careful to seek out any sign a phase is coming to an end. If we offer all our titles to suit what has just sold, we will be at great risk if the public taste does change, so we want to offer a bit of a range, a line-up if you will. In this case we might only have one spot in out list for a particular flavor of tale, and we must choose the one that offers us the best chance of selling big. We have to take into account our authors as well. We have some authors whose books we sold in the past. If one of them has a new manuscript, we will prefer it over a newcomer’s, because each of our established author’s titles helps to sell the others. Booksellers are familiar with this author’s name, and will gravitate toward it. Any author who has had a big seller or won awards for his past works will have quite a plus to put on the jacket to encourage sales. But at the same time, we always need to look out for a rising star, who might well turn out to be our established, big-selling, award-winning author of tomorrow.

The third wall the talesman’s work will face is the book-seller. A few great chains dominate book stores in North America, but there is also a wide web of independents. These stores have buyers who will meet with the sales representatives of the publishers to decide which books to stock on their shelves. Here for the first time space becomes a consideration along with time. A store has only so many linear feet of shelves, and can display only so many titles.

Along with the wall of book-sellers comes the wall of libraries. The public library system has become a great force in the success or failure of many kinds of books today. The library is like the book-seller in that the reader will go to the library as he will go to the book store, to find a title to read. The library is unlike the book-seller in that it has more things to consider than simply if a title will prove popular. A library’s ‘mission’ is different from the for-profit book store.

The next wall the title must pass through is a parallel wall to these others. It is the wall of notoriety. There are reviewers in the major newspapers and magazines that appeal to book-readers, and there are reviewers online. There are book clubs, and there is word of mouth. These all can encourage a particular title to pass through the choke-points of the major walls along the way. I’ve already mentioned how a published author can encourage his editor to read an unagented manuscript. Favorable critical reviews encourage book-sellers to stock a title, or stock it in more depth, or put it on the shelf face-out rather than spine-out, or add it to a special display of greater prominence. Favorable critical reviews encourage publishers to devote more marketing resources to a title, and to buy stands in book stores, and to pay for the author to go on the road to promote the title.

The Bison Who are Apes

The result of all these walls is to make it hard for a new author to see his tale published and for sale in the local book store. He must see that his manuscript makes it past each of these high walls. Each wall winnows the field of all the titles that seek to surpass it. A thousand manuscripts are offered to the agent, who will agree to recommend a score; five of the score might be published and one of the five makes it onto the book store shelf. Though many are offered, few are chosen.

This forces the talesman who wants to earn his bread as an author to consider his tale in two ways. He must think of it as a tale, that he wants to write, that he enjoys writing, that he would want to read, that is good, or even great. But he must also think of it as he imagines the gatekeepers at the walls will think of it. He finds himself thus in a position of juggling his own tastes with what he imagines are commercial considerations.

How does the young writer find out what these commercial considerations are? He reads books on how to write; he attends conferences; he goes to book signings and tries to chat up the author du jour; he looks at the shelves of his local bookstore to see what is selling; he ‘plays the sedulous ape,’ as Stevenson put it, to the big name authors whose tales his most resembles.

The result of this process is a kind of self-censorship. It is an apprenticeship not in telling tales, but in producing fiction that resembles the conventional fiction that is selling now, and has sold in the recent past.

This is not of needs a bad thing. Part of what the young writer learns deals very much with the basic laws of talesmanship. The agents, editors, and booksellers are more in touch with what ‘works’ in tales of any given genre than many novice authors and even the reading public themselves. It is easy for a new talesman to get carried away into the land of his own quirks and tastes; if he writes for his own ears alone, the question arises whether anyone else will hear him, or like what they hear him say.

Part of the apprenticeship, though, leads new writers to write tales that are like what has already been written. A sameness, a blandness, may result.

The gatekeepers are not perfect, they are mortal men after all. The proof that they are not perfect can be seen in the fact that, even 30 years after the industry moved largely to concentrate on producing mostly big blockbuster books, publishers still pay huge advances for titles that flop, and best sellers come out of nowhere and surprise the editors.

The Lone Wolf

In contrast to all this, a new paradigm of publishing has arisen. It is the descendent of vanity publishing, and it is called epublishing, self-publishing, print-on-demand, and it uses the Internet and other modern technologies to get a tale around all the big walls of commercial publishing.

The effect of this other world of publishing is very different on the young author.

He can put away his Writer’s Digest how-to books. He can put away his Literary Marketplace. He can write what he wants — whatever he wants.

In the commercial (traditional) world of publishing, the best hope of the young writer is to be compared to a famous name. To write like best-selling authors, and to make books that are like theirs. In the world of the lone wolf, the best hope of the young writer is to be make his own name stand out. To make books that are completely different from those of the best-selling authors.

In the lone wolf world, the young writer has to mine his oddness and his quirks, even accentuate them. The lone wolf world will grow huge in number (indeed it has already done so: cf. how many books http://www.lulu.com offers each year) because it lacks the choke points of the walls of traditional commercial publishing. Nothing gets winnowed out of the lone wolf world. Every single manuscript that gets finished (and a large number that never get finished) is offered, put out on the Internet. The reviewers of the traditional commercial book world disdain these titles; they haven’t enough time to review the ‘acceptable’ titles put out by the major publishers, and certainly don’t have time to swim the oceans of the lone wolf world.

In the traditional world of commercial publishing, a title stands out if it repeats a popular success of the past, but does it better somehow — maybe with a twist or wrinkle, maybe with a deeper emotional power, maybe with a greater facility of words. But in the lone wolf world, a title can only stand out if it blazes new territory, and is nothing like the popular successes of the traditional commercial world.

Choices

This offers the young would-be writer two roads and he must choose one or the other; they are so unlike that it’s hard to see how one could follow both at once. The traditional commercial world offers the chance of great fame and fortune; if your work makes it through the Great Winnowing, it will stand out as one of a small (well, huge, but much smaller than the oceans of titles in the lone wolf world) number of titles on offer. Traditional publishers will pay the young writer an advance on his royalties; this is part of the wager the publishing house places with each title. And for the gratification of the peacock of the young writer, a ‘real’ book that can be bought at the local book store will hardly be surpassed even by the rarest of rare commercial success in the lone wolf world.

Authors can make more money in the lone wolf world. In the world of epublishing, authors’ royalties as a percentage of sales is much higher. Total sales though are lower, and advances are exceedingly rare. And there remains a stigma on titles that appear only through the lone wolf world. Most readers will not consider such titles as ‘real books.’

The lone wolf world is also a great Unknown. it remains in its infancy, and there is no sure way to tell how it will grow, and what are the paths to ‘success’ one may find in it.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday 27 March 2008)