A lot has happened in the world since I last chimed in on this blog.
I could talk about gun violence and mental health, in the wake of numerous high-profile and tragic shootings. But many people are already doing that, to far better effect.
I can shake my head at the political gamesmanship over the oncoming economic difficulty variously called ‘the fiscal cliff’ or ‘the fiscal curb’. I’ve already written to my Republican senators and representatives, politely begging them to get back to work in the name of hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks who will feel the pinch when sequestration begins. I’m not a lobbyist, so I can’t do much more than that.
I can look at civil war in Syria, megalomania in Egypt, anti-rape protests in India, a dozen political or financial-bingo-card topics from around the world. My voice doesn’t matter in any of those discussions, save as a minute part of the aggregate conversation.
And yet, it does matter…because I have a platform. No one might ever read it, but I can technically be published and thus exposed to millions of readers, just by hitting the ‘publish’ button on WordPress.
People who’ve grown up with social media as a background in their lives have no idea what came before. Think of a loud, sprawling, and gloriously messy city, filled with every convenience at the click of a button or screen icon. Then consider a vast and isolated desert surrounding carefully guarded oases, a wilderness crossed by caravans of experienced travelers banding together in more-or-less mutual protection and apprenticeship.
A very long time ago, a print magazine called Newsweek began a feature called ‘My Turn’, which was technically open to the public. Technically, because unlike many local newspaper opinion slots, those meant for Newsweek were considered for relevance and literary merit. My Journalism and English classes in college were filled with students aiming at ‘My Turn’ and other open forums, because they provided a shot at real journalistic credit. We kept score how often we’d submitted opinion pieces to various magazines. We compared notes on fiction markets and literary agents (or sometimes held the information jealously to ourselves.) We made horrendous mistakes and learned from them; or else crawled away shattered, in denial, seeking less maddening professions.
But it all happened by mail, and it happened with seemingly geologic slowness. The process forced patience upon us. It made most of us hone our writing and research skills with each major disappointment or minor victory.
In the summer of 1988, I had the chance to see the process from the other side, as a summer intern for a modestly-successful literary agent. The agent herself was busy helping her existing clients. I read her slush pile. It was both awful and awe-inspiring, because every single one of those authors was as sure of themselves as I’d been. Most were terrible writers. By looking objectively at their efforts, I realized I was also a lackluster writer.
My responses didn’t come from any kind of ‘sour grapes’ – I’d already signed a waiver that my employer would not consider or recommend my work to any of her colleagues. If anything, I felt deeply connected to and sympathetic toward each author. Even so, I answered total strangers’ hopes and dreams with carefully bland rejection letters created from macro phrases. The phrases meant no more than ‘No’, but the agent thought they’d make the submitting authors less unhappy. She wanted them to keep going, to learn their way, and be as successful as possible. But until she accepted one of them as a client, she wasn’t their babysitter, tutor, therapist, or best friend.
In the grand old days of mailed submissions, we received 10 to 20 query letters or manuscripts a week. I passed on a larger number to the agent than I was perhaps supposed to: 12, that whole summer. Of those, she considered 2 manuscripts. If I recall clearly, she accepted one of those manuscripts and sold it to a genre mass-market paperback publisher a year or so later. One summer’s slush pile = one published novel.
Now, with the explosion of digital media and publishing platforms, those hapless authors don’t need to go through gatekeepers like myself or the agent who hired me for a summer, or through the editorial winnowing at big publishing houses. If authors are skilled enough at formatting and design, they can self-publish electronically for free or at very modest cost. If they are unsure about their skills or strapped for time, they can pay independent editors, artists, and designers – or pay a subsidy publisher to do most of that work. Self-published success stories make every author dream about the new Gold Rush.
It’s a wonderful new world, but it comes with its own heartbreaks. Because publishing is so easy now, authors can publish long before they’re ready – before they have the chastening epiphany that they are not ready. There’s more stuff published now, so readers have more unmitigated crap to wade through on the way. Social media links authors with readers, but those linkages can be easily gamed with paid reviews and interviews, meaningless contest awards, and retaliatory online flamewars. Readers have a tendency to stay within favorite genres. Newer writers often seek more-sympathetic social groups who will blindly support them, instead of encouraging them out of comfort zones. Authors who self-publish have lost first rights, and their books are often off the table for any serious publisher.
Many of these authors will never have the financial payout they wanted. Sales of self-published or subsidy-published works seem to average under 100 copies per edition, unless the work is 1) really good and 2) a viral marketing campaign gets it noticed by more than gushing friends and family. These numbers are sadly, eerily similar to the numbers of people never earning good money in most multi-level marketing businesses, and for similar reasons. Authors run out of friends and family ‘customers’ quickly. The ‘product’ may be overpriced and of lower-quality, and not as important as the nebulous feel-good goal of ‘I’ve been published!’
Many authors who jump the gun go on to make the same mistakes with other books – or even the same book in multiple editions. Without improving their work, they keep self-publishing, subsidy publishing, or publishing through small, new, untested companies which might or might not survive the first year. I’ve noticed a fair number of these authors go on to create their own publishing companies, which may or may not perpetuate the previous problems. Some are outright scams designed to separate credulous authors from easy money. Most are run by well-meaning folks who genuinely want to offer something new in the marketplace, but their experience may not be enough to make the business succeed.
One thing I really love about the new electronic publishing world: it’s so much easier to learn the ropes now than 24 years ago. Every facet of the publishing world is dissected at length online, somewhere, by people who know the business. We have no external excuses anymore for being taken advantage of and rushing too quickly to publication. The information is out there, if we just just take the time to look.
Soon Newsweek will cease as a print magazine. The ‘My Turn’ feature continues as a vibrant, career-building, consciousness-raising venue for people with passion and important stories. But it’s one tiny thread in a tapestry of millions.
It’s never been a better time to be a writer – but it’s never been a worse time to be a lazy or impatient writer. The wilderness is still there in the dark places between the big-city lights.