Why is the publishing business in such a perilous state?
October 19, 2009Robert McCrum has one the the answers, in yesterday’s Observer: because the decisions are no longer taken by editors, but by sales people on the basis of sales projection figures.
Such is the climate in which new fiction is often published today. At the public end, there’s the razzmatazz. Off-the-radar, new fiction by unknown writers, the lifeblood of the business, is being scrutinised by people who have neither appetite for, nor understanding of, originality…
After a decade in which the editor had been king, with very mixed results, and certainly a lot of wasted investment, the suits took control. Some editors were purged, others were muzzled. The balance of power shifted towards sales and marketing, backed up by the newly dominant book chains.Here, as in Hollywood, the cry was: “Give us books that look like other successful books” or: “Give us authors the public’s heard of.” Publishers’ lists began to fill up with lookalikes: sequels to genre hits, film and television tie-ins, books by celebrities. Worse, serious writers became imprisoned in the tyranny of the Epos system, the computerised record of backlist sales. Fail an Epos audit and marketing didn’t want to know. That’s no way to run a creative business. Original books are, by definition, not like others. They must be selected by experienced readers (aka editors).
Ezra Pound’s injunction to writers was “make it new”. But if the dice are loaded, and the people who are calling the odds are not readers but marketing people, what hope for new fiction?
Which about says it all … until you look at it from the writer’s point of view, and find successful novelist Amanda Craig on her blog asking ‘What is the point of keeping on writing?’ -
If you happen to be one of hundreds of so-called “mid-list” authors, life has never felt more grim. Few of us have ever been able to live off our income from books, but now, if you haven’t ever written a best-seller, been on Richard & Judy, had a TV or film adaptation or been short-listed for a major prize, the future has become absolutely horrible. Journalism, which has always been the default setting for many, has either slashed its freelance rates by 25%-50%, or vanished altogether. Teaching, the other standby, is besieged with eager new applicants and so hedged about with testing and regulations that anything approaching creativity is almost impossible.Meanwhile, authors travel up and down the country to go to literary festivals where, humiliatingly, they sell almost no books…
Sharon,
It is depressing stuff when you look at the hole large publishers have dug for themselves. The veil of hope on the horizon is that we still have independent publishers like Two Raven Press, Canongate, Salt, Tindal and Accent Press, though like all, struggling in the current economic climate, but still managing to continue to provide a platform for the original voices of fiction. That includes authors from the regional areas so many large publishing houses seem so ill at ease with.
Keep the candle burning.
Thanks, Mick. We’re all stocked up on beeswax and matches here :-)