Like everything else, publishing seems to be melting down. Harcourt announced a buying freeze, but they aren’t the only one, just the only one that has bothered to make it public. In other companies, salaries are frozen, lay-offs are rampant, and a general constriction is beginning. The economy is in the tank and no one is getting out unscathed.
So what does this mean for me?
2008 is coming to a close and, like 2007 and 2006 before that, I do not have a book contract. I haven’t sold a short story, either, but to be fair I haven’t been writing any. None to speak of, at least. I’ve finished a couple that I’d been working on for some time, but every new attempt just ends up in the ditch. But the books came along just fine, thank you, and since 2005 I’ve completed three. As I mentioned a couple posts ago, I’m starting work on another. I have no shortage of viable directions with novels, at least when it comes to writing them.
Selling them?
I had hoped to get out of the ranks of the unpublished by now. Maybe it’s a good thing, since I suspect that the next several months will engender a massive shake-up in the industry. We may see a number of Big Names handed walking papers from their current publishers. Some may disappear altogether. Certainly advances will contract.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The whole system of advance against royalty that has dominated publishing for lo these last thirty years, reaching in some cases ridiculous heights, has become untenable. Where do people think publishers are getting that kind of money in the first place? They’re borrowing it. Rather than pay out reasonable advances and then be scrupulous about royalty payments, they have developed a practice of paying out money they don’t have and then trying to figure out how to cover the loans through creative bookkeeping. You see ripples of this from time to time (remember when Stephen King sold a novel for a dollar to force his publisher to be honest about royalties?) but for the most part no one wants to really talk about it because, frankly, there’s too much money at stake.
Whatever the reality may be about financing of authors and books, it is obvious that current practices are unsustainable, just like so much else in our business dealings, and this kind of crash was inevitable.
I was talking to a writer I know the other day, someone who ought really have no problem selling his next book, who was caught up in this. He’s talking about moving to small press. Doing graphic novels. Working on screenplays. A variety of strategies, the impetus of which boils down to the fact that he might not get another big book deal.
He suggested that the coming years may be the time of the small to medium-sized presses, that regional publishers and niche publishers will reap the benefit, talent-wise, of the lunacy that is the Big Publishing World. I agree, of course. But that doesn’t exactly thrill me. I’ve been through the small press grist mill and it has left me less than enamored of the idea. I want a big book deal. Just one. Something that will get me recognized as a serious property.
Because I still don’t quite believe people see small press as legitimate. Branding, at least in this country, is an all-encompassing seal of approval. People who don’t trust their own taste or their own ability to decide for themselves what is good or bad rely on branding to tell them what to buy next. So when a book comes out from Doubleday or Random House or HsrperCollins, they have some way of knowing that the writer is Worth A Damn. It turns out not to be a consistently reliable metric, true, but a book is expensive these days and time is precious and how else do you determine if the risk is worth it? A book coming out from Huckypuddle Press just doesn’t carry that kind of reassurance.
Now, for an already-established author, it’s less a risk. I just bought a copy of John Crowley’s novel Endless Things, which concludes his Aegypt series. The first three of those were published by Bantam. This last is from Small Beer Press. Crowley’s name will carry over. People might scratch their heads at the imprint, but it’s Crowley, so here’s my $24.00. But what about Simon Andanshulter? His first novel is being published by Joe Blow Publishing in East Chotawqua, Backabeyond. (This is a fictional entity, from Simon to now.) Is he ever going to rise to a level of name recognition that either he or his publisher will be able to Make It?
I don’t know. It might work out. There are so many factors invovled that the future is hard to predict. I thought having at least one or two novels from a major house would garner me enough readers that a move to Joe Blow Press would make it viable. It doesn’t seem likely now that this will happen.
So what am I going to do?
Well, I’m getting a four day weekend over Christmas and probably New Year. I can jot down ideas, brainstorm, plot and plan. Or just loaf. But in January, regardless, it looks like I have to set my sights lower down the food chain—which, when all is said and done, may end up being fairly high on the food chain—and find a small press through which I can at least continue to publish. Because I really don’t want to stop doing this. But I’m tired of fretting and pining at No Word or Thank You Very Much But This Is Not For Us.
So strategies shift. If I’m careful, I can make it work, just not the way I originally intended. Part time day job, part time novelist.
For those reading this who may be interested, I do do public speaking. I write reviews. I have done occasional journalism. I’ve taught workshops.
But meantime I have a new novel to write. So I’ll be doing that.
And maybe ’09 will surprise me.