One Last Shot Across the Bow

I know, I more or less signed off this blog – – and I will continue the odyssey through my writing/publishing career. But One Thing deserves to be said again today.

This One Thing has its birth in a latest issue of Publishers Weekly magazine. Although I’ve terminated my publishing arm, I still have a subscription, and in a latest issue, the mag has an article proclaiming that Big Publishing’s sales or down, where they’ve been for, well, since before COVID. So what is PW saying about it – – where writers are concerned? For the answer, look a half dozen paragraphs down.

But here, I’ll give a bit of a retrospective: The big houses have been bought out by even larger corporate megaliths. Where publishing houses for at least a century had found good manuscripts and talented writers and spent time and money developing obvious talents into popular world class writers. Some did make the Big Time. Others, not so much, partly because they had families and careers outside the writing world. They took on the mantle of Mid-List Writers.

Now the mid-list writer is gone. And no one in the corporate world gives a whit about developing writers’ talents, Instead they want to know what their platform is. Meaning how many copies can this person sell in, say, three months. Advances are paltry if they’re offered at all, and very little is done by the Bigs to market their writers’ work. I’m reading one now by a Big that won the Pulitzer. There’s talent afoot there, but the writing seems hurried and the dog-work of editing was clearly cut off, probably to meet a deadline. So what’s the alternative?

Small presses.

Any agent you talk to will tell you he or she has a couple of specific editors they go to in order to sell a manuscript. most in NY, and virtually all with NY credentials with the Bigs. Because corporations don’t take big chances on anything, the editors are pushed into more specifics. These are open mostly to celebrities and referrals from academe. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a book published by a Big, the author being someone who graduated from an MFA program and clearly never had their writing skills challenged. Only 1 or 2 of those I’ve read seemed better than something written by an unmotivated sophomore in high school. Meaning if you take care with your writing, have it researched and critiqued appropriately, don’t have an inside straight to Big Publishing, and don’t write in a specific genre in the ways those folks want to see your work, they won’t give you a second look. Again, what’s the alternative?

Indie presses.

Some of these may be bigger than mine was. Some are quite expansive, literarily and business-wise, but most are simply open to good writing and an interesting story line. So guess what? This is where many good writers are turning now – to small indie pubs. And this is being noticed by PW. Why? To make it in a small pub, you have to be innovative. You have to tell a compelling story, with interesting characters, and otherwise push writing into wherever modernism is heading. And I don’t mean the American version of postmodernism. In any field, you go where you’re wanted, where your work is appreciated, and that’s the innovators, the indies. That’s where the action is. Writers are realizing it. And so is PW.

So, dear writer, forget the big houses. Go where you’re wanted, where your skills as a story-teller will be appreciated.