The classics should always be promoted but if the best they're counting on for expensive book space is the classics, then they're dying because they're not finding new and up and coming authors. The big pubs are spiraling out, slowly but spiraling, and while I can't imagine they don't know it, they're not doing anything new to innovate and stay alive--one more reason to stay with Indies and self publishing.
As always you have to keep pushing to the next thing. I wrote novels for a long time but could never get anywhere with the traditional markets. It was dismal and now I better understand what a small window of opportunity there really is with them--they don't even know what they really want to put on bookshelves and they're outdated and woefully behind the times.
However, I started reading short fiction and listening to it and, for something new, started writing short fiction and boom. Four years ago I had two publishing credits to my name that weren't fiction. Now, I have 24 stories published with 15 different presses and now my novel, sliced into 4 novellas, is out and working on my behalf. It's a physics problem of steady effort over time, but also trying new and different things to get the word out, to show your wares to the kinds of people who will appreciate it and you have to keep working toward your own end goals.
It's a crap ton of work and I'm basically working two jobs--my writing career being one but worth it. It's too bad we didn't grow up in the time frame when authors just wrote and let he publishers market for you but those days are dead and whether we like it or not, writing is synonymous with marketing.
You're right, Craig. My experience is similar. I got tired of pitching my book(s) to agents and publishers - long response times when they bother to respond, draining negatives ... I put energy in short fiction while I waited on the book. It's the best decision I ever made. It got me in touch with other writers, multiple mags, indie publishers. I found a publisher for my short story collection thanks to these contacts and I just signed a book contract with a solid indie publisher. None of that would have happened without the short stories.
That's awesome. Happy for you. AND....that's the way the old crowd used to do it. I lot of the biggies in science fiction and fantasy published stories in magazines until they hit with a publisher ;)
The traditional publishers talk about wanting new and fresh writing but they're so afraid of taking chances they end up not trying new voices. And, yes, right now, because of their blindness to marketing they're on the brink of folding and are caught. Sad.
I've got a YA sci-fi trilogy that I know is every bit as good as my shorts, but because I write dark horror, and because my social media presence isn't a wholesome, pristine and faultless display, I can't imagine a traditional publisher would ever touch it. Sad for them because I'll find an indie publisher or self pub it at some point (yeah, it sounds like sour graping but it's about the reality of the "professional" markets and how narrow their visions are).
Craig, Martine, I'm not dissimilar to you. I went through the process, submitting the short stories, pitching to the literary agents, getting the official education, and after nearly a decade I decided this is not going the way I need it to.
I've shown I have patience. I've shown I have skill. If the gatekeepers say no, let's get a second opinion with the market.
And you know what? The market is saying, we want what you have to say, and we want more. My feeling now is that by the time the gatekeepers see what the market is saying, it will be a huge loss of money and momentum to let them have my work.
Agreed. That whole nonsense of submitting and giving them exclusive access to read and assess your work for 6 months or more is B.S. of the first order. AND, they don't even have to respond if they don't feel like it. I got tired of that nonsense too. They need us more than we need them--especially since they're shifting the marketing off to their authors anyway. That's about the only clout they had before.
Yes, there are some iffy books out there in the Indie world but there's a lot more good stuff happening now too. Readers are going to use word of mouth once they find the quality authors and help with our advertising. It's going to hurt traditional publishing even more but I don't have sympathy--they've had shots at my stories before ;)
I think we are well situated and poised to take advantage of the markets.
I realized in the last couple of years that I am bitter toward the traditional publishers and agents. While I get they're up against a lot, it doesn't excuse their behavior toward potential clients who have to traverse their gauntlets.
A friend just sent me an interesting article from the Spectator--you have to give an email to read it so I'll cut and paste...very illuminating for us "white male" writers....
Although they insist upon churning out fashionable woke thinking, the public is just not buying it
December 5, 2023 | 10:50 am
Written By:
Joanna Williams
It was easy to choose books for my young nieces and nephews this Christmas. First, I ruled out stories about boys who think they are girls, girls who dream of having their breasts removed and pet rabbits unhappy at being misgendered.
Then I rejected books telling toddlers how to be anti-racist and older children how to be allies to their black classmates. Feminist manuals on women who changed the world, all of which feature at least one woman who was actually male, went the same way as history books that divide the past into tales of victimized black people and evil white people. Worthy tomes about climate change, rising sea levels and Greta Thunberg were also discarded. By this point, with so few books remaining, the choice was all but made for me.
It turns out I am not alone in this book-selection method. Although publishers insist upon churning out fashionable woke thinking, the public is just not buying it. Take Page Boy, actor Elliot Page’s gender transition memoir. Page secured a whopping $3 million for the book but, according to the sales tracker BookScan, only 68,000 print copies have been sold. Readers, it seems, are less than enthusiastic. The same goes for Claudia Craven’s novel, Lucky Red. Only 3,500 copies of this “queer feminist western” have shifted, despite Craven receiving a $500,000 advance.
Politics, not literary quality, become the primary concern
Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan is a grim-sounding novel about three young black and biracial girls who are abducted by a man before being first abandoned and then traumatized by a racist society. Ferrell was reportedly paid more than $250,000 for this debut work but it has sold only 3,163 copies since first being published in 2021. Another flop is Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me, the story of a young gay black man in the mid-1980s. Bought for $250,000, it has only sold around 4,500 print copies.
Inexperienced editors, hired following the killing of George Floyd, have been blamed for these high-profile misses. But someone clearly recruited all these new and diverse young editors. The problems currently facing the publishing industry run far deeper than just a few rookie errors.
In recent years, we have seen staff at Penguin Random House in Canada protesting after being asked to prepare a book by Jordan Peterson and employees at Hachette refusing to work on J.K. Rowling’s latest volume. We’ve had books by established authors such as Kate Clanchy subjected to sensitivity readers while contracted authors, like Nigel Biggar, have had manuscripts rejected upon completion. Meanwhile, promising new authors struggle to get noticed in the first place. Author Joyce Carol Oates revealed that a literary agent friend of hers said he “cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”
“Again and again, those in the New York literary universe explained… that it was my job to tell stories that furthered The Narrative,” wrote Alex Perez in the Free Press. What this means in practice is that books are selected for publication with either messaging or the identity of the author to the fore. This seems to be an open secret. “We flat-out decided we weren’t going to look at certain white male authors, because we didn’t want to be seen as acquiring that stuff,” one senior editor told Perez. Meanwhile, for authors fortunate enough to overcome all these barriers, the final hurdle is the book shop. Even here, there are traps. Shops stand accused of not displaying books by gender critical authors.
At every stage, the publishing industry is steeped in woke thinking. Politics, not literary quality, become the primary concern. There is little place for plot-twisting page-turners, or beautiful literature or the fascinatingly informative. Instead, readers are expected to appreciate the “diversity” of the writer as they wade through a by-now familiar diet of intersectionality, social justice, gender ideology and critical race theory. Diversity, it turns out, does not mean difference but biological, intellectual and creative conformity.
Ultimately, readers are not getting the books they want. And this is, at last, beginning to show up in the industry’s bottom line. The collective revenue of the top five publishing houses, which was $25.7 billion in 2020, has been flat for almost two decades. Then, in 2022, print book sales fell by 7 percent.
There is some evidence to suggest that frustrated readers and authors are turning to self-publishing on sites like Substack and that a crop of new independent presses are beginning to emerge. For the sake of readers everywhere, the transformation of the publishing industry cannot come soon enough.
The classics should always be promoted but if the best they're counting on for expensive book space is the classics, then they're dying because they're not finding new and up and coming authors. The big pubs are spiraling out, slowly but spiraling, and while I can't imagine they don't know it, they're not doing anything new to innovate and stay alive--one more reason to stay with Indies and self publishing.
As always you have to keep pushing to the next thing. I wrote novels for a long time but could never get anywhere with the traditional markets. It was dismal and now I better understand what a small window of opportunity there really is with them--they don't even know what they really want to put on bookshelves and they're outdated and woefully behind the times.
However, I started reading short fiction and listening to it and, for something new, started writing short fiction and boom. Four years ago I had two publishing credits to my name that weren't fiction. Now, I have 24 stories published with 15 different presses and now my novel, sliced into 4 novellas, is out and working on my behalf. It's a physics problem of steady effort over time, but also trying new and different things to get the word out, to show your wares to the kinds of people who will appreciate it and you have to keep working toward your own end goals.
It's a crap ton of work and I'm basically working two jobs--my writing career being one but worth it. It's too bad we didn't grow up in the time frame when authors just wrote and let he publishers market for you but those days are dead and whether we like it or not, writing is synonymous with marketing.
However, as you keep telling us--we can do it.
You're right, Craig. My experience is similar. I got tired of pitching my book(s) to agents and publishers - long response times when they bother to respond, draining negatives ... I put energy in short fiction while I waited on the book. It's the best decision I ever made. It got me in touch with other writers, multiple mags, indie publishers. I found a publisher for my short story collection thanks to these contacts and I just signed a book contract with a solid indie publisher. None of that would have happened without the short stories.
That's awesome. Happy for you. AND....that's the way the old crowd used to do it. I lot of the biggies in science fiction and fantasy published stories in magazines until they hit with a publisher ;)
The traditional publishers talk about wanting new and fresh writing but they're so afraid of taking chances they end up not trying new voices. And, yes, right now, because of their blindness to marketing they're on the brink of folding and are caught. Sad.
I've got a YA sci-fi trilogy that I know is every bit as good as my shorts, but because I write dark horror, and because my social media presence isn't a wholesome, pristine and faultless display, I can't imagine a traditional publisher would ever touch it. Sad for them because I'll find an indie publisher or self pub it at some point (yeah, it sounds like sour graping but it's about the reality of the "professional" markets and how narrow their visions are).
Cheers to you!
Craig, Martine, I'm not dissimilar to you. I went through the process, submitting the short stories, pitching to the literary agents, getting the official education, and after nearly a decade I decided this is not going the way I need it to.
I've shown I have patience. I've shown I have skill. If the gatekeepers say no, let's get a second opinion with the market.
And you know what? The market is saying, we want what you have to say, and we want more. My feeling now is that by the time the gatekeepers see what the market is saying, it will be a huge loss of money and momentum to let them have my work.
Cheers to both of you!
Agreed. That whole nonsense of submitting and giving them exclusive access to read and assess your work for 6 months or more is B.S. of the first order. AND, they don't even have to respond if they don't feel like it. I got tired of that nonsense too. They need us more than we need them--especially since they're shifting the marketing off to their authors anyway. That's about the only clout they had before.
Yes, there are some iffy books out there in the Indie world but there's a lot more good stuff happening now too. Readers are going to use word of mouth once they find the quality authors and help with our advertising. It's going to hurt traditional publishing even more but I don't have sympathy--they've had shots at my stories before ;)
I think we are well situated and poised to take advantage of the markets.
This reply is everything I think and feel summed up better than I could say it myself.
I realized in the last couple of years that I am bitter toward the traditional publishers and agents. While I get they're up against a lot, it doesn't excuse their behavior toward potential clients who have to traverse their gauntlets.
Yeah...explains why the traditional publishers are failing and why some of us can't get in . . . now I'm REALLY staying Indie/self pub!
A friend just sent me an interesting article from the Spectator--you have to give an email to read it so I'll cut and paste...very illuminating for us "white male" writers....
https://thespectator.com/book-and-art/publishers-stopped-caring-about-readers/
Why publishers stopped caring about their readers
Although they insist upon churning out fashionable woke thinking, the public is just not buying it
December 5, 2023 | 10:50 am
Written By:
Joanna Williams
It was easy to choose books for my young nieces and nephews this Christmas. First, I ruled out stories about boys who think they are girls, girls who dream of having their breasts removed and pet rabbits unhappy at being misgendered.
Then I rejected books telling toddlers how to be anti-racist and older children how to be allies to their black classmates. Feminist manuals on women who changed the world, all of which feature at least one woman who was actually male, went the same way as history books that divide the past into tales of victimized black people and evil white people. Worthy tomes about climate change, rising sea levels and Greta Thunberg were also discarded. By this point, with so few books remaining, the choice was all but made for me.
It turns out I am not alone in this book-selection method. Although publishers insist upon churning out fashionable woke thinking, the public is just not buying it. Take Page Boy, actor Elliot Page’s gender transition memoir. Page secured a whopping $3 million for the book but, according to the sales tracker BookScan, only 68,000 print copies have been sold. Readers, it seems, are less than enthusiastic. The same goes for Claudia Craven’s novel, Lucky Red. Only 3,500 copies of this “queer feminist western” have shifted, despite Craven receiving a $500,000 advance.
Politics, not literary quality, become the primary concern
Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan is a grim-sounding novel about three young black and biracial girls who are abducted by a man before being first abandoned and then traumatized by a racist society. Ferrell was reportedly paid more than $250,000 for this debut work but it has sold only 3,163 copies since first being published in 2021. Another flop is Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me, the story of a young gay black man in the mid-1980s. Bought for $250,000, it has only sold around 4,500 print copies.
Inexperienced editors, hired following the killing of George Floyd, have been blamed for these high-profile misses. But someone clearly recruited all these new and diverse young editors. The problems currently facing the publishing industry run far deeper than just a few rookie errors.
In recent years, we have seen staff at Penguin Random House in Canada protesting after being asked to prepare a book by Jordan Peterson and employees at Hachette refusing to work on J.K. Rowling’s latest volume. We’ve had books by established authors such as Kate Clanchy subjected to sensitivity readers while contracted authors, like Nigel Biggar, have had manuscripts rejected upon completion. Meanwhile, promising new authors struggle to get noticed in the first place. Author Joyce Carol Oates revealed that a literary agent friend of hers said he “cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”
“Again and again, those in the New York literary universe explained… that it was my job to tell stories that furthered The Narrative,” wrote Alex Perez in the Free Press. What this means in practice is that books are selected for publication with either messaging or the identity of the author to the fore. This seems to be an open secret. “We flat-out decided we weren’t going to look at certain white male authors, because we didn’t want to be seen as acquiring that stuff,” one senior editor told Perez. Meanwhile, for authors fortunate enough to overcome all these barriers, the final hurdle is the book shop. Even here, there are traps. Shops stand accused of not displaying books by gender critical authors.
At every stage, the publishing industry is steeped in woke thinking. Politics, not literary quality, become the primary concern. There is little place for plot-twisting page-turners, or beautiful literature or the fascinatingly informative. Instead, readers are expected to appreciate the “diversity” of the writer as they wade through a by-now familiar diet of intersectionality, social justice, gender ideology and critical race theory. Diversity, it turns out, does not mean difference but biological, intellectual and creative conformity.
Ultimately, readers are not getting the books they want. And this is, at last, beginning to show up in the industry’s bottom line. The collective revenue of the top five publishing houses, which was $25.7 billion in 2020, has been flat for almost two decades. Then, in 2022, print book sales fell by 7 percent.
There is some evidence to suggest that frustrated readers and authors are turning to self-publishing on sites like Substack and that a crop of new independent presses are beginning to emerge. For the sake of readers everywhere, the transformation of the publishing industry cannot come soon enough.
Racism is just taking a new form...
This is AMAZING! Thanks for sharing.