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Many of the pieces published in this column originally appeared in the 1980s or 1990s but have undergone revision to make them timely for today's reader. When I selected this 23-year-old essay I considered updating it, but as I reread it I was struck by its relevance to today's conditions. I've therefore decided to present it as originally published.
Just one background note. Up until the mid-1980s, hardcover publishers usually sold reprint rights to outside paperback publishers. But when both hardcover and paperback houses realized the advantages of merging the two formats under one roof, there was a spate of mergers and acquisitions, laying the foundation for the "hard-soft" publication deal that is the backbone of almost all book acquisitions today. RC
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I've always liked editors but I never used to feel sorry for them. That changed when the acquisition of Doubleday was announced.
Until then, whenever I heard that a publisher had been acquired by some sprawling conglomerate, or merged with another publisher, or had simply given up the ghost and shut its doors, my first thought had always been, This is bad for authors. The displacement, the disruption, the disarray caused by these corporate earthquakes have been nothing short of calamitous. The publishing landscape of the past thirty-five years is littered with ruined books beyond counting and haunted by the shades of authors whose careers have been maimed and prematurely terminated.
But in the tumultuous last week of September 1986, when deals were concluded for the acquisition of Doubleday and New American Library, my first thought was, How terrible this all must be for editors. I spoke to a great many of them after the deals were announced, and I can assure you that few were not anxious and disturbed, if not downright scared. It had finally dawned on editors everywhere that there was no longer any such thing as job security at a publishing company.
What happened to Doubleday was a harbinger of things to come, for, as long as most publishing people could remember, the firm had symbolized bedrock stability— - a fortress impervious to the corporate wars that left almost none of her sister-houses unaltered. If anything, Doubleday had bolstered its foundations some years before with the acquisition of Dell Publishing Company, a major paperback house. After the acquisition, the shadow of change darkened the desks of everyone who worked in publishing, and anxiety lurked in every corridor. "Every time my boss buzzes," one editor told me, "I say to myself, 'That's it. They're letting my department go.'" This constant knot in the stomach exists for workers in every area of publishing, including sales, marketing, accounting, publicity, and art.
That the deals were good for the buyers and sellers, few observers question, although there are some aspects that could tarnish the splendor of the prizes. Doubleday's book division had been losing money for some years, owing in good measure (in my opinion at least) to its failure to adjust to the revolutionary change in the nature of our business that made the so-called hard-soft publishers the predominant beasts in the jungle. Indeed, one of the few divisions of Doubleday that was operating in the black, other than the New York Mets baseball team (which they subsequently shed), was Delacorte Press, which had always acquired hardcover and paperback rights together. At the time of the acquisition, Doubleday seldom, if ever, acquired books for its Dell paperback line. Nor did it bend in its rigid refusal to give authors a greater share of paperback reprint revenue than the traditional fifty-fifty split, something that other hardcover houses had yielded to in order to gain competitive parity when bidding for properties against hard-soft houses.
Bertelsmann, the German publishing group that acquired Doubleday, also owns Bantam Books, which controls the largest share of the paperback market of any American publisher. The addition of Dell potentially eliminated one competitor from the already shrunken list of paperback firms, and swelled Bantam's market share to a size that some observers thought might attract the attention of Justice Department trustbusters. It didn't, however: monopoly in publishing doesn't yet seem to be very interesting to our government. But a lot of Dell editors braced for pink slips. "I've got my résumés out," one editor told me. "When the other shoe drops, I'll be ready."
If you stood back and simply admired the deal, Viking Penguin's acquisition of New American Library was an excellent one all around. A few years before, Viking had united with England's paperback giant Penguin in order to give both companies stronger hard-soft capability in the United States. But Penguin lacked entry into the critical wholesale paperback market. And so, New American Library, which had been bought by an investment group a few years earlier, was seen as a perfect place for Penguin to enter that market. And Viking would, it was thought, be able to play hard-soft ball in the major leagues.
Ten years later, Penguin's parent company, Pearson Ltd., acquired the Putnam and Berkley groups, and though (at this writing) the various imprints are functioning separately from one another, anyone who has worked in publishing in the last decades of the twentieth century has seen what happens when corporate executives look at their holdings and ask, "Why do we need four companies competing for the same books? Let's eliminate some of them." And poof! Another competitor gone, and more editors canned while the Justice Department sleeps.
Job anxiety had infected the thinking of editors throughout the history of postwar publishing. But because many of you may be too young to have lived through the turmoil of acquisitions, mergers, overhaulings, phaseouts, reorganizations, disassemblies, and absorptions, or for those in the publishing business who are too close to daily affairs to step back and see the carnage through a panoramic lens, let me recite a partial roll call of companies that are no more, or are now just divisions or imprints of the companies that consumed them.
Appleton-Century-Crofts (a division of Prentice-Hall) Prentice-Hall (acquired by Simon & Schuster) Simon & Schuster (acquired by Viacom Corporation) Atheneum (acquired by Charles Scribner) Charles Scribner (acquired by Macmillan) Macmillan (acquired by Simon & Schuster) Little, Brown (acquired by Time Inc.) Warner Paperback (merged with Little, Brown) Avon Books (acquired by the Hearst Corporation) Arbor House (acquired by the Hearst Corporation) Fawcett Books (acquired by Ballantine Books) Ballantine Books (acquired by Random House) Times Books (acquired by Random House) Pantheon Press (acquired by Random House) Alfred A. Knopf (acquired by Random House) Random House (acquired from RCA by the Newhouse organization)* Bantam Books (acquired by the Bertelsmann Group) Doubleday (acquired by the Bertelsmann Group) Dell Books (acquired by the Bertelsmann Group) Basic Books (acquired by Harper & Row, then deacquisitioned) Crowell (acquired by Harper & Row) Abelard-Schuman (acquired by Harper & Row) Harper & Row (acquired by Rupert Murdoch's NewsAmerica Corporation) Playboy Press (acquired by Berkley Books) Ace Books (acquired by Grosset & Dunlap) Grosset & Dunlap (acquired by Berkley Books) Berkley Books (acquired by G. P. Putnam's) G. P. Putnam's (acquired by MCA, sold to Matsushita, then to Seagram, then to Pearson Ltd.) Pyramid Books (acquired by Harcourt Brace, renamed Jove) Jove (acquired by Berkley) Coward-McCann-Geoghegan (acquired by Putnam, then dissolved) Dial Press (acquired by Dell, sold to Dutton) Dutton (acquired by Elsevier, sold to JSD, sold to NAL) NAL (sold by Times-Mirror to Odyssey Group, resold to Viking, merged with Penguin) Rawson, Wade (acquired by Macmillan) Silhouette Books (acquired by Harlequin from Simon & Schuster)
This partial list is drawn from a thumb-through of Literary Market Place, the publishing industry's directory, and I could certainly go on and on. Taken as a whole, the list represents a pattern of seismic instability so severe that if I were an editor today I would strap myself into my chair just to get some work done.
Publishing is a social enterprise that calls for a large degree of organization, hierarchy, and interdependency, and so, by the very nature of what they do, editors are corporate creatures. It stands to reason, then, that the more attention an editor must devote to matters corporate instead of editorial, the weaker will be his or her attachment to books and authors. The emergence of the superpublisher in our century, a corporate entity whose goals only incidentally have anything to do with the quality of literature and the well-being of authors, has impinged to a greater and greater extent on the time, energy, thought, and care that editors are able to give over to books and those who write them, and as you will infer from the list above, the last couple of decades have raised the level of distraction to critical mass.
The most obvious, as well as detrimental, manifestation of this shift of editors' attention is job-hopping. As their love of books and authors is battered by all the firings and hirings, reorganizations, streamlinings, office politics, shuffling of responsibilities, and the buying and selling of the companies they work for, editors feel fewer compunctions about accepting job offers from other publishers. It's hard to feel company loyalty when corporate logos change with the frequency of automobile styles. Low wages have always prevailed in the editorial profession, but higher pay is not in itself a compelling lure for an editor contemplating a move to another company, unless it is coupled with a promise of greater job satisfaction. But if an editor is not getting such satisfaction, he's going to think a lot about his salary. It behooves us to think about how a $35,000 a year editor must feel when he listens to the complaints of authors making many times that amount. "Few of my authors make less money than I do," an editor told me, "and none makes less than my assistant."
The vicious cycle is accelerated as more and more editors, looking out for Number One, jump to other publishers or leave publishing altogether for more lucrative, satisfying, and stable jobs. Even those remaining in publishing find themselves burdened with corporate responsibilities that take them away from what they love most dearly to do - acquire and edit books. Thus, the industry eventually becomes bereft of dedicated editors, and the vacuum is too often filled by people who are more adept at playing corporate games than at developing writers.
In turn, such people place more and more emphasis on buying winners instead of breeding them: acquisition without cultivation. Less and less attention is paid to developing writers; instead, everyone asks how much it will cost to buy and sell them. The publisher that proves itself most capable of acquiring will become the most successful. But the price is dear: When authors are deprived of the time to grow, creativity will be snuffed out. It's as true of literature as it is of agriculture or forestry.
The cycle spins yet faster and higher as other publishers try to emulate the successful ones. Abandoning the philosophy, the tradition, the taste and judgment, and the people that got them where they were, these houses join the chase to try to capture frontlist hits. Even when they snag them, however, they lose a little bit more of their character if not their soul.
The soul of a publishing company is its editors, and when a publishing company alters its fundamental attitudes about books and authors, the sensibilities of its editors must, of necessity, change as well. With promotions and increased corporate responsibilities comes loss of contact with the intimate places in an author's heart where literature is born.
The rest of the editorial staff, as well as the staffs of the other departments that fuel publishing companies, carry on as best they can in the midst of this furious turbulence, but they do so in a constant state of apprehension. How difficult it must be to concentrate, to plan, to pay attention to the work at hand, when upheaval is only one announcement (or even one rumor) away.
Editors today have more in common with authors than they do with the publishing companies that employ them. Both are disenfranchised, and both have become fodder for the relentless march of the takeover.
Post-script: In 1998, as I was reviewing the proofs for the book in which this essay appeared, it was announced that Bertelsmann, owner of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell, had acquired Random House, a company that embraces Alfred A. Knopf, Ballantine Books, Crown Publishers, Del Rey Books, Fawcett Books, Pantheon Press, Schocken Books, Times Books, Villard House and several other publishers.
That was over ten years ago, and the list of mergers and acquisitions since then is easily as long as the one above. And so is the list of the disenfranchised.
Few pleasures compare to reading early iterations of a famous book or musical composition. When Beethoven's long-lost piano rendition for four hands of his Grosse Fuge (pictured here) was discovered and displayed at Sotheby's, I lost myself gazing at it until impatient visitors elbowed me away from the glass case. Not only were there numerous changes and emendations but on one passage the composer had scratched out the score so violently he tore the script and had to apply a paper patch over it. With similar fascination we pore over drafts of the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable") or Beatles lyrics (Paul McCartney wrote something called, "Baby, You Can Wear My Diamond Ring" which John Lennon rewrote as "Baby, You Can Drive My Car") or the Gettysburg Address, which flowed almost fully polished from Abraham Lincoln's hand.
Since the dawn of computerized word processing scholars have rightfully expressed alarm that such drafts of works in progress will be completely expunged by technology. Andrew Motion, in an essay entitled Saving writers' manuscripts for the nation published in the online edition of the Times Literary Supplement, writes,
"A manuscript can show the cancellations, the substitutions, the shifting towards the ultimate form and the final meaning. A notebook, simply by being a fixed sequence of pages, can supply evidence of chronology. Unpublished work, unfinished work, even notes towards unwritten work all contribute to our knowledge of a writer’s intentions; his letters and diaries add to what we know of his life and the circumstances in which he wrote.”
And poet Kevin Stein, in a Kenyon Review article called Death by 0s and 1s, says,
"What eventually finds its way into literary archives may well be altered over time. Today it's the poet's worksheets, manuscripts, drafts, and letters - maybe even her notebooks and scribbled back-of-the-envelope verses. Given the above, however, one wonders if soon computer diskettes and flash drives will become germane to the notion of literary "papers." Those media carry new poems and drafts that never made their way onto paper, so they carry invaluable digital cargo. Sure, hard copy drafts may be printed from each for storing in special collections, but what does it mean to take the original and present it in form the author never felt comfortable enough to give it? Maybe the poem as digital object must be retained as such.
Happily, revision control software exists enabling authors, editors, scholars and students to track iterations and save them for future analysts. Though not nearly as thrilling as standing inside of Walt Whitman's mind as he constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs "Song of Myself", at least the process will not be lost to us entirely, as it was in danger of doing in the early years of word processing.
But now there's something just as ominous to worry about. "Consider", we read in Amazon Kindle = Privacy FAIL by a blogger named Stephanie, "what might happen if a scholar releases a book on radical Islam exclusively in a digital format.
The US government, after reviewing the work, determines that certain passages amount to national security threat, and sends Amazon and the publisher national security letters demanding the offending passages be removed. Now not only will anyone who purchases the book get the new, censored copy, but anyone who had bought the book previously and then syncs their Kindle with Amazon...will, probably unknowingly, have the old version replaced by the new, “cleaned up” version on their device. The original version was never printed, and now it’s like it didn’t even exist. What’s more, the government now has a list of everyone who downloaded both the old and new versions of the book."
"I hope," says the blogger, "this comes off as a crazy conspiracy theory spun by a troubled mind with an overactive imagination."
We hope so, too. But Nicholas Carr, writing about the automatically updatable book in his "Rough Type" blog, has elected to worry this bone. "One of the things that happens when books and other writings start to be distributed digitally through web-connected devices like the Kindle is that their text becomes provisional. Automatic updates can be sent through the network to edit the words stored in your machine - similar to the way that, say, software on your PC can be updated automatically today." "Does history begin to become as provisional as the text in the books?" Carr frets.
It's definitely a fretworthy issue. Given the state of our technology, censorship, rewriting of history, and mind control are only a few clicks away. As blogger Stephanie says, "Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous."
Ernest Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." Maybe. But is anything more fundamentally honest than shit?
The Pirate Bay: Standing Up In Court For A Generation Of Blackbeards
Perhaps the most significant issue emerging in 21st century publishing is the tension between copyright protection and a general sense of entitlement expressed in the motto, "Information Wants To Be Free." Though we've tried to take a balanced view, it's hard to be neutral in the face of blatant, institutionalized piracy. As the legal and moral issues come to a head in a trial that has just commenced, E-Reads' Michael Gaudet analyzes the cynical and contemptuous justifications given by the operators of one website trafficking in copyrighted work.Unnamed and unindicted in the Swedish proceedings are, in Michael's words, "millions of tempted, anonymous Internet users in homes around the world." Would one of them happen to be you?
- Richard Curtis
This week in Sweden, the people behind the infamous website 'The Pirate Bay' are going to trial again for facilitating copyright infringement among file sharers. It isn't the first time Sweden has tried to take them down on behalf of plaintiffs like Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox. But this international group has proven to be a lot more slippery than past violation targets like Napster in the United States.
The defendants have launched a full blown new media campaign they call "#Spectrial" to promote their defense, speak about their motivations, and mock the proceedings. After the first day at trial, the prosecution decided that half of the charges probably wouldn't stand up against The Pirate Bay (reported by the UK Register) and the defendants began to boast more loudly that their movement won't be stopped (“EPIC WINNING LOL,” was what one of them commented on Twitter).
Even though The Pirate Bay doesn't distribute any illegal files itself, its website is essentially an enormous pirate map that lists millions of user-generated shared files, so that visitors from all over the world can quickly find music, movies, pictures, and e-book texts that their internet peers are sharing. Most of the listed files are ripped from purchased media, and in some cases they are leaked material that has yet to be made available at retail.
The Pirate Bay Makes No Apologies For Promoting Theft
The Pirate Bay's advocacy for unrestricted file sharing is one of the most confounding issues for modern publishers with digital distribution. Evangelists for piracy appeal for protection by evoking moral outrage at the injustice of governments policing private communication and hindering fair use. And they raise some difficult questions: does DRM curb our most basic liberties to communicate and creatively manipulate new ideas? Is copyright unlawful? Is copyright infringement fair retribution for inefficient corporate distribution practices? Should governments keep all internet traffic private? A grassroots movement to protect the opportunity to share pirated files says the answer to all of the above is an overwhelming "yes."
All the defendants (Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström) sincerely believe they've done no wrong in ignoring all the requests from copyright holders to prevent the copyright abuse rampant among the Pirate Bay users (see their page of dozens of spurned "takedown" notices and Pirate Bay retorts - "Legal Threats Against The Pirate Bay").
When asked if they felt like "defendants, or defenders of technology,” Peter Sunde replied: "I think it is something in between actually. We have a personal liability for this, we have a personal risk which has some impact on our feelings. But definitely it’s not defending the technology, it’s more like defending the idea of the technology and that’s probably the most important thing in this case - the political aspect of letting the technology be free and not controlled by an entity which doesn’t like technology.” (sic, via TorrentFreak)
A screen grab of the "Top 100 Audio Files" at The Pirate Bay (click for larger version)
If you're relatively unfamiliar with The Pirate Bay, keep in mind that it's a short but important part of the file-sharing wheel using a technology derived from BitTorrent software. BitTorrent, Inc. is the San Francisco-based company that helped develop the technology to assist everyday users in distributing files more efficiently, and while they now have partnerships with many of the plaintiffs, BitTorrent and the similar companies designing software based on BitTorrent have no control over how The Pirate Bay operates.
As More People Share A Seed, A Torrent Gets Faster
When users want to share a file from their computer, they create a "torrent", which is a small proxy file that is "seeded" to the internet, allowing anonymous users to find and download the master file. The benefit is that download speeds typically increase when many users are sharing the same file. If you download without sharing, you're identified by the system as a leecher (to encourage reciprocity). The Pirate Bay servers are what is known as a torrent tracker, a website where torrent seeds are listed by anonymous users like classified ads. Visitors can sort through pages of organized listings for seeds of the latest television shows, albums, and movies that users dare to share. A quick glance at today's "Top 100" listings showed that the most popular movie to download at that moment was a pirated version of The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008), with over 16,000 people actively sharing the file at any given moment, meaning that the whole film could likely be downloaded in less than half an hour.
Even though The Pirate Bay is the most famous destination, other popular torrent tracker sites exist, frequently below the radar of Google and other internet search engines because they list files that break copyright laws.
Keeping It Off The Record
With a name like "The Pirate Bay," no one believes the group's intentions were entirely legitimate to demonstrate freedoms. The Pirate Bay was designed to harbor pirate traffic safely from government authorities. Individual torrents communicate across the users' computers, not over The Pirate Bay servers, which makes the technology so popular with anonymous users anxious to avoid obvious digital trails that could turn up on court seized computers. Anonymous tracker websites are usually expensive to maintain, because the visiting traffic requires remote servers and extensive bandwidth that can cost a small fortune each month to keep online. The Pirate Bay sells advertising space on its website to offset these costs, however it's unknown what their revenue really is.
“We know that about 80% of all the traffic on the internet is torrent related. About half of these 80% are our traffic. Therefor, 40% of all internet traffic is passing through The Pirate Bay." (sic) - Peter Sunde
If that's truly the case, then it's safe to assume they've had the opportunity to capitalize on their traffic, benefiting them more than covering basic infrastructure costs, which is why MGM, Microsoft, and the others feel they will be compensated for the requested $14 million in damages by The Pirate Bay with this latest trial. The defendants insist they haven't become rich and they won't be able to pay any possible court ordered payments - another reason they believe the whole case against them is misguided.
"It is legal to offer a service that can be used in both a legal and illegal way, according to Swedish law," said their lawyer, Per Samuelsson. (The Local)
The effort to shut down The Pirate Bay website and stem the flow of illegal material is unlikely to happen with this court case (or ever, because of their server fail safes - Wired, 2006). The Pirate Bay has been dodging legal bullets for many years by disrespecting lawsuits, hiding its practices, and cleverly documenting that it is not actually ever in possession of the offending material. As difficult as it is to prosecute individuals who are caught with illegally obtained files, it's actually much more complex to argue that the network technology itself is partially liable, especially when the technology is constantly evolving. It's much like trying to shut down the entire English language so that individuals can't utter offensive (or proprietary) words, especially when the individuals are using Morse code.
But the underbelly of this incredible defense of technology is that the primary use of The Pirate Bay is to traffic valuable media for free without the consent of copyright owners and to obfuscate the thieves' trails. The prosecutors are hoping to make it clear that The Pirate Bay's intentions are malicious, and eventually someone will succeed.
Theft Prevention Vs. Freedom On The Internet
The current trade-off for a marketplace that employs copyright is that some usages will be unfairly prohibited and some theft is to be expected, but the marketplace is broader because of the overall financial incentive to content creators. If the courts should ever decide that an individual's right to privately communicate over the internet, even if it's to share stolen material, is worth more to society than copyright protection and Draconian preventative measures, most digital media would be rendered worthless to retailers and there would be a dangerous upheaval for most industries. Luckily for publishers, the file sharing crisis isn't seen by authorities as the "freedom" case The Pirate Bay wants it to be. But nervous industries are still trying to placate disgruntled internet users by finding acceptable common ground, like cheaper, DRM-free MP3 sales, to keep their content from being further devalued by theft.
Companies that are slow at adapting to new market demands to ease theft prevention are facing the worst of the backlash from consumers. Many of the anonymous users of The Pirate Bay are also quick to complain that they can't afford the high prices of the latest entertainment media and software tools, or that they can't buy it in the formats they want (high bit-rate audio files, DivX, etc.). They also feel that "free" acquisition contributes valuable mind share and publicity for companies, which turns into revenue in the future; the popularity of a hit album in file sharing circles might mean more long-term sales because the number of satisfied listeners increases (although the correlation is a dubious one outside of the most exceptional scenarios, such as Radiohead's release of In Rainbows). Some file sharers gloat how they enjoy "sticking it to the man" as retribution. And more and more are arguing that copyright itself is an unfair hegemonic practice that has evolved into a monster (see Richard Stallman's "Misinterpreting Copyright"). This attitude hasn't diminished any in the 8 years since the court rulings that shut down Napster. But it's unclear how many people tacitly understand that these arguments are all being used in defense of negligence to pay what content creators have asked for their work.
Ultimately, The Pirate Bay is quickly becoming more than just another famous example of how the internet offers temptations to transgress social taboos and ignore local authority. Its enormous scale indicates that it has become the latest spearhead of a generation's full-on war against copyrights and preventions against theft. And, what's worse is that today's court battles can't represent the best defense when the real fight takes place daily in the minds of millions of tempted, anonymous internet users in homes around the world.
As the stakes continue to rise in the publishing business, writers are adopting a wide range of strategies to advance themselves out of the midlist and onto better-selling plateaus. I myself have recommended a number of such strategies. Recently, however, as I respond again and again to the question of what one can do to escape midlist oblivion, it's begun to dawn on me that many writers have been ignoring the most obvious answer: write better. The truth is that if all other things are equal, the author with better writing skills is the one who will rise out of the pack.
Instead of reviewing what's selling these days and who is buying it, I thought it might be worth reminding you about some of the most common and flagrant writing transgressions to be found in a typical harvest of fiction works that fetches up on my desk. I hasten to point out that the perpetrators are by no means mere amateurs, but professional writers as well, so let those who are without sin skip this article.
I have to confess at the outset that as I was preparing my list, I realized that nobody has ever come up with a better formula for analyzing problem manuscripts than the boss I had in my apprentice days, Scott Meredith. Meredith created the "Plot Skeleton," which goes something like this: A sympathetic hero or heroine confronts an obstacle or antagonist, creating a conflict that must be credibly overcome through the protagonist's efforts. These efforts result in a triumphant resolution that is satisfying to the reader.
Unsympathetic protagonists, inconsequential conflicts, and uninspired resolutions are the characteristics of most of the fiction that agents thrust into stamped, self-addressed envelopes and return to senders. I have made notes, however, on some other fundamental failures that personally turn me off, and I've boiled these deadly "sins" down to seven. I should add that the problems listed here are the kind that jump out at me so quickly that I can usually make a determination about a book containing them after only a few minutes of reading.
1. The Sin of Lousy Dialogue. Many writers try to carry their books on narrative alone, leaving me hungry for some conversation. Often, when at last I do encounter dialogue, it's of a trivial "Hello, how are you?" "Fine, thank you" variety. By fanning a manuscript like a deck of cards, a professional agent or editor can instantly perceive a paucity of quotation marks. Or, if you like your torture slow, you can read page by page waiting for somebody to talk to somebody else. Dialogue is an invaluable fictional device, yet many writers believe they can tell a story with a minimum of it. A playwright once said that a good line of dialogue reveals something about the speaker, the person spoken to, and the person spoken about. Without dialogue, a work of fiction becomes a tract.
A rapid scan of a manuscript often discloses the opposite problem, a book so replete with dialogue that it reads like a screenplay. In such books, the dialogue reveals little about anybody, because it's mostly talk, and you have to listen to endless conversations in the hope of seizing some nuggets of genuine story. It should be remembered that dialogue is not only a character-revealing device, it is also a form of action, but an excess of it will have the opposite effect. Those guilty of this particular shortcoming should ask themselves in what way a dialogue scene moves the story forward. If too slowly, or not at all, you're doing something wrong.
Writers sometimes forget what dialogue sounds like when actually spoken, and they should therefore try speaking it aloud or performing it with another person. That way, they might avoid one of my all-time pet peeves, which might be described as, "What did you say your name was, dear?
"John, we've been married for fifty years and you haven't given me flowers for the last thirty." "Gosh, Mary, I hadn't realized it." "It's true, John." "Well, Mary, I'll just have to do something about that. "I hope you will, John." etc.
2. The Sin of Inaction. I hate this one because it takes me so long to diagnose. I may have to read as much as half of a manuscript before I realize that nothing, in fact, is happening. This is also the most heartbreaking failure in terms of wasted time and talent, particularly when you realize that it is the most avoidable. Most of the time, it's the result of poor outlining or no outlining at all. By synopsizing your work before you begin, you will readily detect soft spots in your story.
A common offshoot of this problem is often found in mystery novels. I call it the "travel fallacy." After a crime is committed, our protagonist picks up a clue and visits a witness or suspect, where he picks up another clue and visits another person or suspect, who leads him to another, and so forth. All that traveling from one place to another gives the illusion of action, but when you analyze it you realize that the only thing that has happened is the protagonist has gotten into a car or boarded a plane, boat, or bus and gone somewhere. But travel is not to be confused with action.
3. The Sin of Skimpy Detail. Many fiction writers believe that the best way to improve their craft is to study other fiction writers. Certainly one can benefit from reading the work of others. But if your spare time is limited you might benefit more by reading nonfiction. And not just history and biography but esoteric stuff like costumes of eighteenth-century France, Florentine church architecture, Samurai swords, and modern glassmaking. This will help to cure one of the surest signs of amateurism in fiction, the generalized description: "On the Czarina's desk lay a Fabergé egg." Don't you think a reader would rather read something like, "On the Czarina's inlaid walnut and ormolu escritoire a gorgeous gold Fabergé egg stood on a tripod of wrought gold. The egg was segmented with translucent green enamel trellising and inlaid with ceremonial scenes, miniature portraits of her children, and a particularly handsome portrait of Nicholas resplendent in blue uniform and gold epaulettes . . ." etc.
Though books about furniture-making or Russian enamels may not be as entertaining as the latest novel by your favorite writer, reading the former will ultimately pay bigger rewards in the rich texture of your writing.
4. The Sin of Unimaginativeness. Not only do writers fail to describe the real world in sufficient detail, often they portray imaginary worlds in inadequate detail as well. If that world is not thoroughly thought out, readers will know it and eventually lose attention. I find this to be particularly true of fantasy and science fiction, where it is all too easy to think readers will buy into a writer's world simply because it is alien. A planet warmed by binary suns may be a good premise, but if the writer does not describe in detail how these twin stars affect this world's ecology, culture or customs, the strangeness of the premise will soon wear off and the reader will be left in the equivalent of Akron, Ohio, in space. Worlds that never were possess as much detail as those that are or used to be, and the writer's task is to research those worlds as assiduously as a scholar might research ancient Thebes or Alexandria.
5. The Sin of Weak Characterization. A similar criticism applies to characterization: many writers simply do not "research" their characters in adequate depth. Making up character details as one goes along may work well for a rare few, but I get the impression that many writers have not "investigated" or "interviewed" their characters at length. The result is trite people.
The way to investigate your characters is to create dossiers on them that can later be reviewed as though one were a reporter going through diaries and scrapbooks. When and where was your character born and raised? Who were his parents, his grandparents? What events, friendships, circumstances affected his upbringing? What schools did he go to, jobs did he take, romances did he have? Whether or not you actually use all of the material you enter into your file or database, your intimacy with your characters will come through to your reader and they will feel you know more about the people in your book than you have revealed.
6. The Sin of Clichéd Story. The boredom factor is higher among agents and editors than it is among average readers, and a good thing it is, too. Writers don't always realize that stories that may seem unique to them are trite in the eyes of agents and editors. For every plot you write, we may see dozens of similar submissions. I freely confess to being easily bored, and I've stopped castigating myself for it, for I realize boredom is a critical symptom that a manuscript has gone wrong. I try to monitor the moment at which I started to lose my concentration and involvement, then to analyze precisely what it was that turned me off.
Much of the time, it's a story I've heard before. I am weary of coups against the President of the United States (the Vice-President is behind it every time), former-CIA vs. former-KGB cat-and-mouse games, Arab-Israeli terrorist machinations, female journalists turned detective, and Colombian drug lords doing just about anything. Not that these stories cannot be rendered fresh: indeed, that is precisely the point. I demand, I beg, that they be rendered fresh. But if I start to nod off, I know that the author has failed to approach a familiar story from an unfamiliar angle, and that's it for me.
7. The Sin of Triviality. In order for a book to feel big, it should deal with, or at least allude to, issues that go beyond the day-to-day concerns of its characters. Yet, many authors fail to give their story weight or dimension, and the result is often a book that feels trivial and inconsequential. Take a simple love story: boy meets girl and they fall in love. They have a jealous quarrel and break up, but they are eventually reconciled and end up getting married. Such a story is the stuff of a romance, and that's probably where it will end up.
Now let's retell the story. It is December 7, 1941. Boy and girl have met and fallen in love, but on that fateful day the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and the world is plunged into war. Boy enlists and is shipped overseas to fight. In war-torn Europe he falls in love with a beautiful French girl, while at home girl has fallen in love with an older man in the munitions factory where she works. Boy and girl break up, marry their lovers. Years go by, both marriages go bad. Boy and girl look each other up, discover they still carry the torch for each other, and are reunited.
The difference between these two love stories is vast, but what is the essential difference? It's that in the second one, history, destiny, and war play a part in the story as if they themselves were characters. The war has taken a silly love story out of the realm of triviality and invested it with a dimension that approaches the tragic. It is not difficult for writers to add such dimension to their work but not all of them do so, and if it is missing, I quickly lose attention.
A team that is struggling is often told by its coach to go back to basics. That's not bad advice for struggling writers, either.
Michael Hirschorn's recent article in The Atlantic, a doomsday scenario projecting the death of the New York Times as early as May, chilled the intellectual community like an icicle rammed into its heart. For all who care about the shift of paradigms from Ye Olde Printe to digital media, his End Times (a canny pun) is required reading. The fact that a Mexican billionaire rescued the paper with a $250 million investment was a huge relief, for the New York Times Company had been facing a host of unpalatable options analogous to choosing among shooting oneself in the foot, the kneecap, the head or the behind. Sadly, numerous other newspapers and magazines bedeviled by the twin evils of collapsing circulation and plummeting advertising will probably not find such a benefactor. If you're of a vulturine turn of mind you can learn about them on the website Newspaper Death Watch.
But it was a throwaway line in Hirschorn's piece that turned my blood to curds. After summarizing the many obstacles that "The Newspaper of Record" faces, Hirschorn wrote, "Alternatively, Google or Microsoft or even CBS could purchase The Times on the cheap, strip it for parts, and turn it into a content mill to goose its own page views." In other words, instead of rescuing and reviving the paper, the buyer could send it to the journalistic equivalent of an automobile chop shop.
Anyone who's had a car stolen knows what a chop shop is. It's an underworld garage where your car is disassembled and the tires, headlights, fuel pump and every other valuable part is removed from the chassis and sold to sub rosa auto body shops. If you think of the New York Times as your car, and its archive the carburetor and transmission and hub caps, perhaps your blood will curdle too. But why stop with the Times? Every struggling print publication is vulnerable to a similar dismantling.
And so, my dears, are book publishers.
Do we believe that they would be less subject than newspaper and magazine publishers to acquisition by media giants whose only interest is mining their content? We would like to think so, and there's some precedent for hoping it wouldn't happen. As a rule, in the history of book publishing in the last few decades struggling publishers have been picked up by stronger and more affluent publishers that understood how to exploit the backlist of the acquiree. But there are plenty of examples of publishers being taken over by members of entirely different species, corporations or conglomerates that have little or no emotional attachment to books or empathy for the people who write, edit and produce them. Looking back over the last few turbulent decades we see that a number of publishers were acquired for the cachet of culture and intellectualism; as soon as the cachet wore off and the realities of razor-thin profit margins sank in, the owners were more than happy to dump their book publishing assets.
Today, many of the publishers that are struggling are not modest in size - they're giants, as characterized by layoffs, reduced acquisitions, or budget cuts by such behemoths as Simon & Schuster, Random House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin, Macmillan and Harper. If things were to get worse, or even if the owners were hard-up enough for cash, we could see another round of acquisitions by companies less interested in the culture than, simply, in the content. And off the top of my head I can think of outfits like Ingram, Adobe, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Verizon that might make a tasty meal of the rich trove of intellectual content in books. The cost would be petty cash to them. Some of these companies have dipped their toes into publishing and backed off, but that was then.
It this scenario too fanciful to credit? Any publishing person over 45 years old has seen things he or she would not have believed could happen, the buying and selling of titans like Random House, Doubleday, Putnam, Bantam, Macmillan and dozens of others as if they were trading cards in a childrens game.
Back in 1986, for the year-end issue of Publishers Weekly, I contributed a bit of doggerel entitled Merger, He Wrote summarizing the orgy of mergers and acquisitions that had taken place that year. Here's an excerpt:
With tax-law changes ‘round the bend, Other houses joined the trend. CBS unloaded Holt: To Harcourt Brace the firm was solt. And, glasses raised in loud “L’Chaim!”, Scott Foresman joined the march of Time. More turbulence: Congdon & Weed, Atlantic Monthly Press, Dodd, Mead.
Thus in frenzied syncopation Proceeds the trade’s consolidation. Scores of famous names of yore Have since succumbed to corporate war Or publish books with but a semblance Of their former independence.
As the value of print media drops, and the power and wealth of digital media rises, another round of acquisitions could be shaping up, and this one won't inspire poesy, good-natured or otherwise. Chop shop operators are standing by... Richard Curtis
"Merger, He Wrote" Copyright (c) 1986, 2008 by Richard Curtis
With the Authors Guild getting angry at Amazon's Kindle 2 for read-aloud technology (see their statement), many readers (and writers like Neil Gaiman) are wondering how a robotic-sounding voice reading is an infringement on the rights of a published book. And if that's an issue that requires prevention, then why haven't other non-professional readings been restricted (like when you read a bedtime story to your kids), and could they be in the future? And what about the sight-disabled readers and their legal right to access text in this manner?
I seriously doubt the Authors Guild is going to sue moms for reading Dr. Seuss, or sue the blind, or sue publishers for allowing that to occur. What's of concern is who's making money from the added value of the reading performance, whether it's a digital voice or not, and the Authors Guild is trying to make sure that a line is drawn in the sand now before an income stream (audio "performance" rights) dries up, because new technology often gives distributors a chance to make extra money before the author realizes how valuable it is.
Decades ago, audio rights were pretty unpopular. They were sorted into many publishers' contracts as ancillary, or completely left out - that is to say, unless it looked profitable for more than just rare radio adaptations. (No one really even tried to distribute novels performed and recorded to LP records–who wanted to flip a record every 30 minutes for a ten hour reading?) What changed all this was the age of the cassette tape: car radios with cassette players and the Sony Walkman. With the new convenient medium that lent itself well to long listening sessions, there was a new market. And publishers eventually started making extra money from the potentially lucrative books-on-tape edition of their texts, often without having paid authors any additional advance for the audio rights. This was good gravy for the publishers when the audiobook was a hit, even though the books-on-tape market was relatively tiny compared to book sales. By the time that CD technology increased the quality and cost efficiency per unit further, authors and agents already knew it was worthwhile to negotiate better terms and payments for the audio rights, to make sure that this commodity was now compensating everyone properly. In some cases, the rights were starting to be reserved by the agents so that they could be sold to the growing field of specialty audiobook publishers. In the last 8 years, MP3 file distribution of these recordings (especially through iTunes or Audible) has only made the market more competitive. So, unlike 40 years ago, today everyone is aware that the audio rights can make money when handled properly.
The primary distinction of the audio rights is not so much that a real human voice is involved and compensated; it's more that a publisher consented reading or "performance" of the book has controlled distribution (each copy is accounted for), and that the proportionate value of this performance makes money for the publisher and author. This is why parents reading to their kids isn't an issue, or even teachers reading in a classroom. In those cases, the average reader is adding a negligable value (commercially speaking) to the book by speaking it aloud themselves, and that's fair use. Now if that reader wants to go on stage (or the web) and sell their reading performance without publisher consent, it's another story.
With computer assisted reading, the value added is a bit more contentious. First of all, there are disabled readers who require text to be spoken aloud, and digital voice reading is a welcome technology for them. This service is valuable to those people, sometimes at a premium. However, the typical expectation is that disabled readers are adding the value themselves through assistant technology, and that they haven't paid inclusively for that assistance when they purchased the text. For example, you don't pay an additional $1 for read-aloud service offered to you from the book you've bought. You paid $357 for the Kindle 2, which adds that service to the book.
The cost of the digital voice application is a moot point to publishers, agents, and authors. What worries them is that in the future the voice applications are going dramatize the text too well, and that the additional exceptional value isn't compensated to them in any way under current contracts. Amazon's Kindle 2 was developed with the read-aloud function to add value not only to the Kindle, but to make the books themselves a better commodity–to sell more books.
Picture the future, when you've got an e-book of the latest bestseller and you ask your little e-book device to read it to you. Right in front of you pops up a digital hologram of John Houseman (licensed to the device by the actor's estate), and he proceeds to read the book to you in his nuanced dramatic voice (recreated through excellent programming). He reads Chapter 4 to you while you prepare dinner in the kitchen. He sits in the passenger seat, delivering chapter 14 as you commute to work the next day. This is essentially the benefit of read-aloud, although the Kindle 2 or Apple's Text-To-Speech isn't quite that far advanced yet. However, I'm sure you can see that a good digital voice has the future potential to add a lot of value to the reading, enough to give today's properly recorded audio books something to worry about.
The issue is that this value added isn't accounted for in current distribution contracts between the publisher and e-book retailers like Amazon, and potential publisher revenue might be getting lost (or cheated away from the future), and that's what rankles the Authors Guild. I'm not a fan of sword waiving tactics, but there needs to be new descriptive contract language that pertains to the read-aloud service. I'm not sure how accounting for the read-aloud service in financial terms can be done until there's a proven track record for consumer habits with this technology. Those numbers aren't available yet. But Amazon and other companies are investing in the technology more and more, so someone sees there's money to be made there in the future.
In many ways, it's an issue not unlike protecting song performance rights so that companies like YouTube can't make money off "free" performances of copyrighted material. (I'm not sure an amateur 8 year-old singing Miley Cyrus songs for YouTube has much value, but aggregate all the entertainment from thousands of such videos and it starts to paint a different picture until it appears obvious the songwriter is due some small increment of YouTube's revenue from distributing those clips.) Publishers don't want to chase after innocent people, but they also don't want to encourage wholesale ripoffs with loose legal terms. So maybe it isn't a bad idea to start new discussions with all the major players now about the audio rights for e-books and bring the agenda to Amazon's Jeff Bezos or a company like Google. I'm looking forward to having David Niven read me Sherlock Holmes stories on my Kindle 4 and I'd hate for anything to stand in the way.
Reading the names of staff cut by Harper (you can't call it HarperCollins any more because the "Collins" was vaporized in yesterday's violent contraction), by Simon & Schuster and other publishers is like reading a list of army buddies fallen in battle. I knew, laughed with, negotiated with, celebrated with, quarreled with, dined with, drank with, and loved many of these people. Some I met only once or casually bumped into at industry functions, but even that was enough to add to the pool of relationships that extended my contact list into the thousands. Even those I never met face to face at all went into the contact list on a "You never know" basis - one day I'd have a reason to call on them, and in fact I frequently did.
The removal of all these people from the day to day scene has drawn much of the vibrant color out of the bazaar known as trade book publishing. Life will go on but it will be darker and sadder.
It would be easy to delete them from my contact list but I can't bring myself to do so, and I won't until they turn up at a new position and I know they're out of harm's way. Until then, I've created a new designation to place beside their names: "A.R." - Awaiting Reassignment.
To honor my fallen comrades, the least I can do is take my finger off the Delete key.
In Watching Books, an Authors Guild Bulletin article published last summer, I wrote
Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed - even, God help us, bored - when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium.
As I'm not a social scientist, these observations were not supported by hard research or statistics. Thanks to Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University writing in the New York Times, they are now powerfully reinforced by metrics supplied by such solid data gathering organizations as Nielsen and ComScore.
Surprisingly, Stross focuses not so much on the Internet as on television. You'd think that TV, like print media, would be losing ground to YouTube and other Web distractions (nearly 100 million viewers watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos in December alone!). In fact, watching television in the third quarter of 2008 increased by five hours a month compared to the same period in 2007. "Tellingly," says Stross, "YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership - it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen."
In short, whether it's YouTube or BoobTube, "A tipping point has been passed in the competition between print and screen that has been under way since the beginning of broadcast TV and now continues with video and other media."
Stross's conclusion: "People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention."
In Watching Books, I wrote,
The fundamental appeal of books is their ability to transport us to the author’s world. The best books immerse us so deeply in that world that we become almost immune to distraction. But screens are breeders of distraction from the sort of commitment to thinking, reflecting, and imagining that books demand. Books are vehicles for ideas; one can set a book down and ruminate and process. Computer monitors, television sets, and e-book screens discourage reflection. Thinkers simply live in a different time zone from watchers.
Stross echoes my own disheartening comments: "We used to speak of reading a book as an immersive experience, too, but 'immersive' now seems shorthand for 'video on a screen.'"
"Smitten with screens" is his phrase for it, and I can't think of a better one. Read Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens in full and - if you can spare a little time between your TV programs and your Internet videos - reflect.
As we said last week, every society creates rules to prevent anarchy, and the society of author-publisher-agent is no exception. Of course, the more civilized the society, the subtler its rules and the more sophisticated its sanctions for reinforcing them. The publishing business certainly fits the description of a civilized society, comprised as it is of well-educated, literate individuals operating in highly organized (sometimes, anyway) corporate entities and dealing in the extremely sophisticated activity of translating ideas into merchandise.
The rules governing this behavior are codified into a system of protocols and etiquette called "courtesy." Courtesy is not always easy to define because editors, authors, and agents each have their own code and the three don't always harmonize. Authors who are unsure about the rules are advised to proceed cautiously.
In the first part of this article we discussed five vitally important rules. Three of the them were, Keep your big mouth shut.
Here are the other five.
6. Report everything to your agent. In due time you may have direct contact with your editor and other staff members of your publisher concerning a variety of matters. Your editors might feel there's no point in bothering your agent about small stuff, so they will contact you directly. In most cases the business at hand will be routine, and requests will be innocent. But they can develop into problems if the author isn't alert or fails to discuss developments with his agent. Those routine queries about your manuscript by your copyeditor can develop into a request for a rewrite. The nice young lady who calls asking you to name some dates when you're free for promotional appearances may end up bullying you to accept a time that is inconvenient to you. I'm not saying it will happen every time, but it has happened in the past, and it can happen to you if you don't keep your agent au courant.
7. Keep your big mouth shut. When you're out with an editor, don't contradict your agent or question his handling of your work. And don't tolerate your editor's questioning of your agent's handling of your work. Publishers often have a vested interest in dividing authors and agents, and anything you inadvertently do to help them promote such divisions can only redound to your discredit and disadvantage.
8. Don't play your agent and editor off against each other. In your eagerness to please everybody, you may end up defeating yourself. On many occasions, for instance, an author and editor may have a friendship that long predates the relationship between author and literary agent. The introduction of the agent into that bond creates instabilities that may result in jealousy, tension, and even hostility, and the author sometimes fosters these emotions without realizing it, for it is, let's face it, highly gratifying to have two people fighting over you. How often has a client said to me, "That dirty rat Joe down at Feemster House has been taking advantage of our friendship for years, so on that next contract I want you to wring every dollar out of him that you can." Then, a moment later, he'll add, "But go easy on the guy, okay? I mean, he and I are old friends."
Experienced agents are sensitive to the dynamics of friendships between authors and editors and don't barge into the middle of them like crazed water buffaloes. If, however, your agent does feel he has to be firm or tough with your old buddy, don't interfere. That, after all, is what you hired him for.
9. Keep your big mouth shut. Don't spread rumors or gossip, however knowledgeable it makes you look. For, in the long run, it makes you look like, well, a gossip. Because this is a gossipy industry, discretion is a highly prized virtue, and one that far outlasts the pleasures of spreading the Hot Scoop about somebody. And because this is also a small industry, gossip has a way of turning on its disseminators. As in any small town, you never know who is a friend, ally, relative, or business associate of whom. Rumors are traced to their sources with far more ease than you would imagine. Don't be a source: You don't need enemies.
10. And finally (all together now) - Keep your big mouth shut. When in doubt, err on the side of silence. Let your work and your agent speak for you. Whenever you feel that impulse to say something that you suspect may be out of line, consider that you really have only two choices: count to ten and call your agent, or count to twenty and call your agent.
Don't make your agent's job harder by putting him or her into the position of having to apologize for you or explain away some indiscreet things you may have said. "God!" an agent friend of mine once burst out. "My job would be so easy if it weren't for authors!"
Although we tend to lose sight of the fact, writing is still a profession. Behave professionally. As a wise person once said, the best way to save face is to keep the bottom half of it closed.
Every society creates rules to prevent anarchy, and the society of author-publisher-agent is no exception. Of course, the more civilized the society, the subtler its rules and the more sophisticated its sanctions for reinforcing them. The publishing business certainly fits the description of a civilized society, comprised as it is of well-educated, literate individuals operating in highly organized (sometimes, anyway) corporate entities and dealing in the extremely sophisticated activity of translating ideas into merchandise.
Actually, if you step far enough away from the sophistication of the publishing process you will see that it still boils down to a matter of seller, buyer, and broker struggling primitively with one another for dominance. Anyone who has lived in or studied the publishing anthill for any length of time can testify that there is as much plundering, treachery, rapine, and bopping on the head as may be found in the most aboriginal of civilizations. The only difference is that we prefer not to call these things by their names, as it sullies our self-image. I remember an editor's description of the dapper, distinguished head of one of our most illustrious publishing companies: "Oh, he stabs you in the back like everyone else - it just takes you two weeks to realize you're dead."
In publishing, the rules governing behavior are codified into a system of protocol and etiquette called "courtesy." Courtesy is not always easy to define because editors, authors, and agents each have their own code and the three don't always harmonize. For instance, some agents feel there is nothing wrong with not telling an editor they are submitting the same manuscript to other publishers. From an editor's viewpoint, however, that may be perceived as discourteous, for if an editor knows he is one of several considering a submission he will behave differently than he will if he thinks he is the exclusive recipient of the manuscript.
Editors may balk at discovering that an author has taken on a project for another publisher while under contract with them. Even though the author may not be breaching his contract (some contracts prohibit authors from working on any other book until the contracted book is completed), and even though the author completes the first book satisfactorily and on time, and even though the author took on the second project because the advance on the first was inadequate for him to live on while writing it, the editor may nevertheless feel that the author has discourteously affronted the monogamous spirit of the author-editor relationship.
Despite the quaintness of the word, a breach of courtesy can be a grave offense that leads to strained or even ruptured relations between author and publisher or agent and publisher. I recall with a shiver how, as a tyro in the publishing business, I committed such a gaffe against the late and great Macmillan editor Peter Ritner, a blunt and bearish man who brooked no nonsense from callow upstarts. It happened in a swank restaurant at the height of the luncheon hour. I told him I had been speaking to another publisher about his author. "That," Ritner boomed at me in his awesome operatic baritone, "was most discourteous of you, sir." All that night I tossed in bed listening for the stomp on the stairs of Macmillan editorial assistants coming to frog-march me off for interrogation.
Space limitations prohibit me from enumerating all the points of protocol and etiquette that prevail in the editorial world, even if I knew what they were. Many of them are the same rules of the road that regulate other forms of social intercourse. Others are unique to our business. Until you feel completely comfortable in that world, until you know the players and are able to bend or break the rules with impunity, the following ten commandments ought to keep you out of the more serious forms of trouble.
1. Keep your big mouth shut. When speaking to agents and editors, refrain from criticizing other agents and editors. You must never assume that the person you are talking to cherishes the same poor opinion of someone that you do. Many is the time I've listened to prospective clients complaining that this editor was a jerk and that publisher was a fool and this agent was a crowning idiot, and I've found myself thinking, What's wrong with this guy?
If you've had a bad experience, say as little as you can, and if you can't be charitable, perhaps it's best to say nothing at all. Lord knows, people in our business understand when you tell them you toured Chicago and Denver and there were no books in the stores, or your publisher originally promised you a 25,000-copy printing but ended up ordering only 7,500 copies. But for you to say, "My editor just sat there and did nothing, and my agent was too busy going to cocktail parties" may reflect worse on you than on those you so harshly judge, however deserving of criticism they may be.
2. Don't be overly chummy with editors. Whether or not you have an agent, be restrained in your dealings with editors. It is more important for them to respect your work than to like or love you. You must never forget that editors work for corporations dedicated to making a profit, and as often as not that profit is made at the expense of authors. However tight you and your editor may be, the time must inevitably come when you will want something he cannot give you, and he will want something you cannot give him. In the resulting negotiation, the closer your friendship, the harder it will be for you to hold out for the best terms. Your editor may care deeply about you, but his corporation cares deeply about its bottom line, and few editors will stake their job for the sake of an author.
From the viewpoint of an agent, the biggest discourtesy imaginable is for an editor to take advantage of an author's vulnerability. That's why many agents take strenuous measures to keep authors and editors apart and to funnel all communications through their agency. Many agents resist giving out their clients' phone numbers to editors or allowing any direct exposure of authors to publishing personnel. They are acting out of concern that editors may take advantage of authors if given the opportunity.
My own view is that a certain amount of contact is both necessary and desirable, and as long as authors are aware of the pitfalls of such contact, and keep their agents apprised of all developments, things cannot go too far wrong.
3. Keep your big mouth shut. Think before you speak. The things you tell an editor may not have the effect you intended and in fact may have the opposite one. The editor who granted you a nine-month delivery date on your book may not be delighted to learn that you'll be finishing it four months ahead of schedule. He may in fact be appalled that a project as demanding as that one will take so little of your time, upset that you're not doing your research or that you're writing too fast or that the manuscript will come in too short. Better simply to say, "Don't worry, you'll get your book on time." If you do think you're going to finish it early and your editor thinks he would like to get it on an earlier list, you can say you'll try to turn it in sooner.
Volunteer as little information as possible, and try to think things through from an editor's viewpoint. Should you be telling your editor you don't want any more money this year? Should you be telling your editor you weren't terribly happy with the first draft but you're sure the final one will be okay? Should you be telling your editor you had to take on another writing project to make ends meet?
Authors volunteer all sorts of information because they feel the editor is their friend. But if you'll try to project yourself into the mind of your editor, or better yet of his or her boss, you might find yourself biting your tongue a little more often.
4. Go through your agent for everything. If you do have an agent, centralize all dealings through him or her. Contracts, submissions, delivered manuscripts should all be sent to your agent no matter how convenient it is for you simply to send the material directly to your editor. Aside from observing the procedural proprieties by doing things this way, you keep your publishers on notice that you prefer for them to deal with your agent rather than with you.
Even your correspondence with your editor should be sent to your agent for review and forwarding, at least anything more significant than Thank you/You're Welcome. That way your agent may pick up on some things you probably shouldn't be telling. And if that sounds like censorship, it's better than committing a blunder that might injure your relations with your publisher.
5. Keep your big mouth shut. If you have an agent, he or she will brief you before you go into a meeting with an editor. Listen very carefully to what they say. A good agent will background you not merely on your immediate business with your editor but on such things as the state of your publisher ("They're hot right now," or "They're hungry, they haven't had a big book in three seasons"), the position of your editor ("She just joined the firm and he has to bring some good books in fast," or "He has no clout over there"), and other tidbits that will help you get a fix on conditions at your publishing house. Your agent will also tell you what to say and, perhaps more important, what not to say. And if he tells you not to say something, then for crying out loud don't say it, or leave it for your agent to explain. Your agent undoubtedly has good reasons for withholding certain information from your publisher, and those reasons may not always be clear to you. There may be undercurrents in the agent's relationship with your editor that have nothing to do with you, or your agent may know something that you don't. He may be conducting negotiations with your editor for other authors besides you (there are other authors besides you, you know), and his dealings on your book may be part of a larger strategy. If your agent accompanies you to a meeting or luncheon, watch him so he can signal you with his eyes. Or sit beside him so he can signal you with a swift kick in the shins.
I recently wrote about "gatekeepers", the cadre of tastemakers (editors, bookstore buyers, reviewers, critics, etc.) that guard the bastions of popularity against the clamoring horde of would-be's and wannabe's. It's hard to pin down just who these king- and queenmakers are, and even harder to get a clear idea of their selection criteria. The process is maddening and often cruelly arbitrary, like being rejected by the bouncer at a club whose admission policy is not posted: Is it your race? Creed? Gender? Height? Hair? Shoes?
I thought about gatekeepers when I read Motoko Rich's New York Times's article on the thriving author-subsidized publishing industry. It answers the question, What do all those authors do who are bounced from the club? Rich's answer? They start their own club. That is, they take their rejected books and publish them themselves.
Until very recently the phrase most often used to describe this activity was "vanity" publishing, but like most politically incorrect opprobria used in modern parlance it was necessary to find a gentler way to express the concept. Everyone seems to have settled on "self-publishing". Not only does that term spare the self-esteem of its practitioners, but it is also probably more accurate. For, when you read the astonishing number of people who elect the self-publication option, you say to yourself, Surely there could not be that many vain authors, could there? Well...
In her article Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab Rich points out that one outfit, Author Solutions, published 19,000 titles in 2008, "nearly six times more than Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, released last year." And it sold 2.5 million copies of all the books on its list. Rich also cites Blurb, a print on demand outfit, that published more than 300,000 titles in 2008 (not all of them subsidized by authors, clearly). Blurb's revenue has soared from $1 million to $30 million.
About this phenomenon, she says,
"As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster bestsellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs."
Author-subsidized books have always been with us, but how did the phenomenon go from sidetrack to mainline in just a few years?
Every literary agent can testify to the anxiety level of authors eager - all too often desperate - to see their work in print. Even a small agency receives dozens of queries and submissions daily, meaning somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 a year. Publishers did some math and discovered that the odds of finding a gem in the slush were about 20,000 to 1. They then measured the cost of maintaining a staff of first readers and factored in the time invested by senior editors reviewing the recommendations of te preliminary readers, and concluded that that gem would have to be a major and sustained bestseller just to recoup the cost of the search. So the publishers closed the door to slush and dumped the problem on literary agents.
But that didn't lower the odds - it just shifted them from one pair of shoulders to another, and when the rejection-to-acceptance ratio turned out to be about the same for agents as it had been for publishers, around 20,000 to 1, the conditions were ripe for an author stampede. All that was needed was a less expensive means of indulging one's vanity - er, excuse me: publishing one's own books. The late 1990s provided it in the form of such modern miracles as print on demand, photoshop software and other other cheap and easy production and graphics programs. The stampede began.
Only one element was missing: readers. Aside from immediate friends and family, readers proved a scarce commodity. Very few self-published books found an audience (and it is likely that even those who received or bought them never read them) Even fewer broke out of the vanity ghetto, and almost all that did relied on establishment gatekeepers to boost them onto the main track. Jill Priluck, in Slate, draws a very important distinction between merely finding readers and branding yourself: "The proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands."
But there are exceptions, and here's a passage from Motoko Rich's Times piece that caught my attention:
Michelle L. Long, an accountant who advises small businesses, published “Successful QuickBooks Consulting,” a guide for others who want to help businesses use a software package made by Intuit through CreateSpace a little more than a year ago. She said she had earned 45 to 55 percent of the cover price on each sale and had made $22,000 in royalties on the sale of more than 2,000 copies.
“A lot of this niche content is doing fairly well relative to the rest of the economy because it’s very useful to people who have a very specific need,” Rich quotes Aaron Martin, director of self-publishing and manufacturing on demand at Amazon.
Long's book genuinely filled a niche, and if, as futurist and publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin predicts, "the currentformat-specific publishing model must give way to an audience-specific one," there may very well emerge a self-publication business model that serves a real need besides the one so aptly captured by poet Emily Dickinson:
How dreary--to be--Somebody! How public--like a Frog-- To tell your name--the livelong June-- To an admiring Bog!
Many of the pieces published in this column originally appeared in the 1980s or 1990s but have undergone revision to make them timely for today's reader. When I selected this 23-year-old essay I considered updating it, but as I reread it I was struck by its relevance to today's conditions. I've therefore decided to present it as originally published.
With the Authors Guild getting angry at Amazon's Kindle 2 for read-aloud technology (see their 
Picture the future, when you've got an e-book of the latest bestseller and you ask your little e-book device to read it to you. Right in front of you pops up a digital hologram of John Houseman (licensed to the device by the actor's estate), and he proceeds to read the book to you in his nuanced dramatic voice (recreated through excellent programming). He reads Chapter 4 to you while you prepare dinner in the kitchen. He sits in the passenger seat, delivering chapter 14 as you commute to work the next day. This is essentially the benefit of read-aloud, although the Kindle 2 or Apple's Text-To-Speech isn't quite that far advanced yet. However, I'm sure you can see that a good digital voice has the future potential to add a lot of value to the reading, enough to give today's properly recorded audio books something to worry about.
