Getting Published
This site attempts to debunk an illusion harmful to apprentice writers--that "getting published" is a once-and-for-all transformation. With only a few exceptions, the novelists of spring '77 did not "get published" in this sense. They got a publisher. A few years later, they had to get another one. And it was harder.
In traditional publishing, authorities of various kinds decided which writers to make available and recommend to the public. Now a different set-up is emerging, in which writers and readers find each other on their own, mostly via the Internet. It's too soon to say whether the new set-up will be an alternative to the traditional one, or will supersede it. But things are changing and apprentice novelists should take note.
“Over the next few years, the traditional definition of what a ‘published book’ is will have less meaning.”
--Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes and Nobel, to Chris Anderson, 2006
Riggio is one of the world’s leading booksellers. The main reason a writer wanted a “traditionally published” book was to induce people like him to offer it to the public for sale, which he was more likely to do knowing that professionals had invested in it, and, more pragmatically, that if it didn’t sell he could return it for credit. Now, he says, he’s going to be less impressed with traditional publication.
It follows that writers should be less impressed, too.
Writers are going to find it difficult to adjust to the new reality. They’re emotionally attached to traditional publication. “Getting published” is a phrase to conjure with. It’s like marrying your true love or winning the big game--a movie fade-out moment
More seriously, it answers to the need to draw a line between professionals and amateurs—a need felt particularly strongly in fiction-writing, where there are so many aspirants and so few successes. Getting published is not just an achievement but a credential.
In other professions, credentials are degrees awarded by universities and licenses awarded by the state or other governing bodies. Publication is different; it’s a decision by business-people to invest money in hope of a return. Inevitably, it’s more unstable.
Once, it meant a lot. Novelists had a golden century, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth. Good public schooling provided a large literate public, which had fewer choices of other ways of entertaining themselves. This large customer-pool helped give publishers stability. Accepting a writer’s first novel implied a commitment to publish subsequent novels. The writer had sound reason to hope he was on the way to becoming an established author.
From the ‘60s on, the fiction-reading public has gotten smaller. (Drastically, if you accept the NEA’s 2004 report “Reading at Risk”) The publishing industry has tried to make more money, more quickly, from this shrinking pool.
“To publish a book is to do more than print and distribute it. Publishing is trying to find an audience for a book.”
--Howard Kaminsky, president of Warner books, to Thomas Whiteside, 1981
Publishers generally failed in their attempts on behalf of the novelists of spring 1977. They could not find enough of an audience to make it worthwhile to continue publishing the novelists' books. In most cases, after one or two or three books, they dropped the author.
In the ‘80s, the certification “getting published” suffered inflation and devaluation. The number of first novels published went up steadily as support offered most authors thinned. (See Library Journal) Publishers were throwing authors against the wall in handfuls to see if anybody stuck. That might be a good marketing strategy, but it’s kind of tough on writers, as we in the previous generation found out.
But it’s nothing for you in the younger generation to be depressed about. Quite the contrary. We had no alternative to a system that served us badly. You do.
New avenues of book manufacturing, promotion, and distribution are opening to small presses and to writers themselves, as are alternatives to books. But to make your way in this do-it-yourself world, you must rid yourself of the illusion that a publisher would do it all for you.
They might print and distribute, but they won't promote —unless they see big sales potential in your book, and few first novels have that. In fact, one possible future development is that the major publishers will simply get out of the first-novel business, leaving writers to build their own audiences, then making offers to those who have succeeded.
More than ever, then, writers will have to rely on their own inner resources, not on validation from publishers or others.
In the 1989 movie New York Stories, the segment written by Richard Price centers on Lionel Dobie, a famous artist. His winsome young mistress Paulette is an aspiring artist herself, and she hectors him throughout, asking “Am I good? Have I got talent? Am I the real thing?”
Finally an exasperated Dobie bursts out: “What difference does it make what I think? If you’re an artist, you just do it.”
So: do it. And keep on doing it.
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“Having read (and believed) the depressive truths I have communicated, do you still wish to become a writer? Do you still prefer the hideous mischance of authorship to the safe, comfortable, and prosperous occupations of the miner, the airman, the racing motorist, the soldier, the statesman, the steeplejack, the nurse, the charwoman or the housebreaker? Then you are born to authorship as the sparks fly upward. Good luck to you!”
--Frank Swinnerton, 1932