What is good writing? What is successful writing?
I have spent the last years not making a living at being a writer; in particular the last 4 writing 2 novel manuscripts. The first went nowhere. The second may soon follow suit.
For nearly all of that time I had as my credo an outlook very similar to this one, as outlined by Douglas Glover, writer (if you read the whole post, I got involved in quite an exchange with him, one that included regular Don Merritt, too):
A person writes because, through writing, he comes to know himself and the world better. A person may write for money or fame or to achieve social position by posing as a writer, but these are secondary and, to some extent, inauthentic motives that often result in inauthentic and second-rate writing. Inauthentic motives result in second-rate writing because they interpose someone else’s point of view between the writer and the work. The writer writes to an audience conceived loosely as a market. He writes to formula instead of form—and don’t be fooled: there are some very slick and intelligent-seeming formulas out there. Many people who want to be writers do not know themselves well enough to be able to sort out their motives. Again, don’t kid yourselves: most of what gets published is second-rate recyclable literature at best. (Why this would come as a surprise, or even be noteworthy, to anyone in his right mind I have no idea.) If you write to know yourself and the world better, as a means of becoming a better version of yourself in your writing, then certain questions need to be answered in the writing. Who are you? What does it mean to be a person? How can a person relate to other persons? What is real and how do you know the thing you think is real is real? What do you want? How do you differentiate, evade, quell, and dismiss all the false demands of fad, formula, packaging, expectation, received opinion, ideology, and commerce to achieve your own unique answers? How do you translate the answers into words on the page? And, perhaps most importantly, how can you make this fun? If you use your writing as a mode of inquiry, if your plots are dramatic collisions between self and other or between self and the real (always with the preceding questions in mind), and if you are brutally honest with yourself and your characters, then you have a shot at writing well.
But now I’m getting older and staring down the barrel of 30 years at a dayjob and with family responsibilities am not likely to take the leap into graduate school or MFA-land and thus secure a cushy teaching position (which are extremely hard to come by, in any case). And so I’m wrestling with issues of “success”, and success as defined in American society as “money”, or at least, “making a living.”
My writing to this point has been very self-consciously literary. I have taken as my models the Usual Great Ones, Nabokov and Proust and Dickens and Faulkner and etc etc etc. You know, all those hoary old great books (and God, ain’t they truly great) that no one reads except for aspiring writers and college kids keeping the GPAs up. The kind of writing that no publisher today would touch with someone else’s ten-foot pole. No literary agent living today would get through the first paragraph of The Sound & The Fury without hitting “delete”.
So recently I’ve I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t attempt a more popular mode of writing, the kind that does get read, the kind that people are willing to shell over some shekels to Amazon for.
But according to the credo above – which more or less used to be mine – I should eschew all such worldly concerns, and write solely for my own satisfaction, solely to achieve some aesthetic goal which I alone define. By extension then, I should have no concern for any potential readers. Either they see what I’m getting at, or don’t. (In reality, there will be no readers unless first some editor and / or literary agent sees what I’m getting at first.) I should not sully my pure aesthetic concerns with any form of pandering to the marketplace. Hip hip hurrah for art! Right?
Right?
I am not so sure. Not anymore. Later in the exchange Don Merritt told me to abandon all hope of making a living at writing. In truth, I have only just begun to consider the possibility. I used to ignore all that in pursuit of my own goals. And as I consider what my next writing project will be, I am considering – for the first time – if I want to consider the reader, a potential audience, from the start.
Douglas Glover says that by doing as he suggested above, you have a chance at becoming a superlative writer. I ask, who decides who is superlative? Does the marketplace decide? By that rationale, since about a billion people bought The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown must be a literary genius. Lord help us.
But if it’s not up to the people, then is it up to the writer? Can I just proclaim the genius of my unpublished manuscripts, which you’ve never read?
Do English professors get to decide? How about critics? I’m not thinking of the professionals so much as those who take the time to do starred reviews on Amazon. You can even self-publish to Amazon, so everyone has a shot. So – if a book gets, say, 100 5-star reviews, is it a good book? If it gets 500, is it a GOOD book?
Who gets to decide, is what I want to know.
These may seem like naive questions. (Douglas Glover characterized them as cynical on our comment exchange, which as I write this is still going on.) But I mean them sincerely. I admit to ignorance.
It would appear that after some years of concentrated writing, I have improved my techniques somewhat, but I actually know even less than when I began. All I know now is that I don’t know. Which is something. But not much.
POSTSCRIPT: As I was finishing this post, Don Merritt posted the following over at Numéro Cinq, which is where all this got started. It’s worth reproducing in full:
I once, in utter frustration, a long time ago, said something like this to my agent, that maybe I should just write genre formula fiction, sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and at least make a living.
She said, you won’t be able to do it. your attempt will stick out and stink like moldy cheese. Because, the successful writers of genre, formulaic fiction are not “writing down” to their audience. They are doing the very damn best they can do. They write directly to an audience that wants exactly what they produce, and they are doing it honestly and at their best ability.
You cannot fake this. You cannot write “down” to your audience and fool them. Judith Kranz (she was our example of this in those days) is writing the very best novel she could possibly write. She is better at this than you could ever be, because you have no interest in writing of this kind, you don’t read it, you disdain it, and it will always show.
In other words, if you want to be a successful genre formula writer, you have to actually be a genre formula writer.
An audience that loves Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is not going to want the Schlitz you offer them. They know the difference.
Just do whatever you do the best way you can do it. The only success, really, is being the best you can be at what you love.
Not the sort of success that pays the bills, I note – but maybe the only real kind of success there is.
Is it?
Court Merrigan
Great post Court. I actually have read both of your books. The first one I really liked, although the ending was not as good as the rest of the book and the whole thing suffered for it. the second one was a great piece of writing but not my cup of tea. I enjoyed them both, and perhaps I am biased because you are my friend, but I really did think they were both good books.
I used to be a musician but not a good one. I played in a band that made a couple CD’s and toured the states. We were a lot of fun to see live and people that saw us for the first time always had a great time. It was the best time of all five of our lives. We never made any money, and after a while that started to wear on all of us, some more than others. Now, ten years removed from that, I live in Thailand and raise kids and marigolds and chickens. I still don’t make any money. The drummer works in advertising and has a kid. The mandolin player got his phd and is currently deconstructing the RNA of plants. Only the fiddle player and the bass player still play music. The bass player writes how-to computer books and plays around San Francisco regularly. The fiddle player is the only one that makes money playing music. he teaches fiddle lessons and does session work when he can.he is currently on a two-month tour of Europe with his new band- a group of much younger energetic aspiring rockers. I am so jealous of him (of course he is an actual genuine brilliant musician) There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t wish I was sitting in a seven-seated tour van pulling into Cleveland or jumping around like Tim Armstrong on a stage somewhere in Kentucky on nickel beer night.
You gotta do what you love and be the best you can be. But you can compromise. Life is compromise, no matter what the pop psychologists say. If that means teaching 8 year olds how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb so you can go to Europe for two months, do it. Don’t get stuck raising marigolds and regretting it.
Accept that you’ll have to work. Find a job that affords you some mental leisure and write whatever gives you satisfaction. If you write honestly enough and well enough someone else will likely like it too. Be extremely happy if you can pierce the veil of disinterest that surrounds people. To do that is a monumental act.
Of course, this would be easy to follow if there were no exceptions.
Famous writers most often have influential connections. I think if you deliberately pursue fame, recognition, or money you’re setting yourself up for unhappiness. I have these issues too.
It’s me again.
These questions may be eternal. Since I am not (yet) eternal, can’t say. But my best guess is they come up at some level within every generation throughout time, couched in different terms.
I am by nature an elitist, and if that makes the Sarah Palins of the world scoff, then so be it. I am not inclined to think that the majority of people know much about anything, certainly not anything of artistic consequence. Television is most successful when it dumbs down, when it “appeals to the mass audience.” This is also the case in publishing. The books that are dumbed down are the most successful. For reasons only known to the mind of one or another of the gods, most people simply don’t think very much. They live at the surface of life and almost never dip their eyes toward the intellectual and intelligent depths over which they hover precariously.
The “just folks” or the “real Americans” that are continually hailed on the what is self-proclaimed as the most popular “news” cable program on TV, are just herds of human animals being driven this way or that way according to the financial incentives of a few people who are way smarter than the herd — Rupert Murdoch, for example.
They read genre, formulaic potboiler novels, those few who are even capable of reading anything longer than fits on text messaging screen, because they are simply not intellectually capable of going any deeper than those superficial story-tellers can offer.
That has not always been the case. The reason for the change is due to invention and how invention alters and defines culture. Really good writers used to sell really well because there was a literate, expectant, and elite audience for their work, but more importantly, an audience that developed within the paradigm of the only game in town — the book. That elitist audience has been shrinking and will probably more or less disappear one of these days, except for the few remaining who are making piles of money herding the masses this way and that way.
I come to this: Life is desperately, maddeningly short, shorter than one not on the verge of the end can even imagine; but it’s really damn short. We came from nothing and we return to that same nothing. There is only the in-between. And it is really damn short. Life is a one trick pony with no second ride.
In that vein, I echo the previous commenter: Don’t get stuck raising marigolds and regretting it.
You will write because you cannot not write. But I hate to tell you this, but the world of the writer you desire, to have been a part of it, would mean we would not be having this conversation, because you would be dead already quite some decades. It was wonderful while it lasted, but it is over; trust me on this.
A PS about publishing.
Book publishing, and certainly those companies that are parts of gigantic conglomerates, are not charities, they are not interested in creativity, and are certainly not interested in “art,” unless those items happen to (accidentally) coincide with profitability. They are businesses. They sell books, but they sell them the way Sears sells refrigerators, or Thom McCann sells shoes, or Proctor & Gamble sells everything.
They have accountants who decide what is going to sell to some designated market. Editors are simply there to handle the nit-picky details that accountants and advertising staff have no interest in — like jacket design, copy editing, and author flattery. Accountants handle property acquisition, editors just make the product more palatable for the marketplace, once the accountants have counted whatever they count to determine unit profitability.
Whether or not the accountants think you have a profitable unit has nothing to do with the artistic creativity and credibility of your work.
You need to never forget that.
Tim – Alright. I won’t. It’s the figuring out of the mechanics of the thing that is so devilishly difficult to figure out. Looking back on it, though, my happiest writing years were those early ones in Thailand, when we were first working together. I was an English teacher in Thailand, and a writer when I wasn’t doing that. I was totally satisfied with where I was at, working toward my own self-set writing goals, working a dayjob. Somehow somewhere along the line my ability to be satisfied in those things evaporated. It set in before I moved back to the States, I think, although I think it has sped up since then. It’d no doubt be best for my mental health if I could return to that state. Be satisfied with tending my own garden. Would you say so?
Brad, I like to think that someone will likely like it, but in this era of a million online journals and etc., it seems the odds are that someone might literally just be a someone. Or a very few someones. Maybe that’s just the way thing are in this time of near-infinite interconnection, a return, in a way, to the days when everything was handwritten and passed around in worn copies, like the wandering Japanese poet/sages of old. With I suppose at least a chance, however infintesimal, of somehow gaining a wider audience. And accepting that the dayjob will always be there. Somehow that was an easier thing to accept, when I thought it was least predicated on the possibility of one day not having to have one.
I wonder, though, if it would be worth achieving some recognition even at the cost of personal unhappiness? I’m guessing you don’t think so …?
Don, if we stand at the end of the world of good writing, or at least widely read good writing, should a writer just write on with no regard whatsoever for an audience? Soldier on in an dying tradition because, as you say, you cannot do otherwise? I have often thought that we live at the end of of the age of the novel, as I have elsewhere said, and on the cusp of some other, as-yet unknowable age. As Brad has also says, the narrative goes on and will go on, because humans are natural raconteurs … and I do wonder, maybe the potboilers really are the best stories. Homer did not work in an obscure literary idiom, not at the time – he just told the story, right? It was only through an accretion of time and tradition that Homer’s oral stories became the foundations of the western literary canon with all its attendant standards and requirements. If Homer hadn’t appealed to the “common man” of his time, we would never have heard his stories today.
Who is going to wade through the obscurantist difficulties of Faulkner a century from now, two centuries? Will it not be easier to read The Da Vinci Code ?
Does it even matter? Not to us, since we’ll be dead. Is there some other, higher, literary realm where it will, though?
It seems so strange that conglomerates devoted to publishign the written word can be so little interested in creativity. And yet there is so very little reason to doubt it is so.
And I still want to know – who decides what is good writing?
The people who decide what is good writing now are the big-time reviewers that are often, I suspect, in league with the big-time publishers. See the current Franzen hype. Pretty already declared the best book of the decade and it’s not even out yet. And Time is interested in putting him on the cover before it’s out, why? Hasn’t he been awesome all these other years he didn’t have a book coming out?
Maybe Freedom is a great book, but greatness usually comes through some sort of accruing of opinion and time. Here it’s being shoved at us.
So that’s who decides what is good writing: the publishers and the reviewers who “work” for them. It’s all a self-sustaining industry. The same thing happens on smaller scales in the Indie lit realm as well.
I happen to think recognition is important and it makes me unhappy because I’d like to have some and don’t. Perhaps if I’d been hugged more as a child, I wouldn’t think literary acclaim worth much. But alas, I’m giddy when someone likes one of my Facebook posts. It’s the world of the literary bottom-feeder. I’m working on ignoring it all. It’s hard.
My wife’s mother always said, “there’s a lid for every pot,” usually in reference to seeing some couple walking by that one could not imagine how they ever got together.
There is a reader for every book, too. The good, bad, ugly. The sublime and the silly.
I don’t think we can predict what will be read in the centuries after we die, and even if we did predict, we’d by definition never know if we were right or wrong. So might as well not waste the mental energy doing it.
Let me return for a moment to my professed elitism, the tastes of the mob, and the analogy of television.
The most popular programs on TV, now and in the past, are almost always the dumbest, the ones intended to appeal to people who want their entertainment easily accessible to their mental abilities and mindless as a distraction from what is often the perilous toiling in their daily lives. Programs that do this are wildly popular and make mountains of money for those who produce and distribute them. Thus with books.
There is no correlation, intended or actual, between any value concept of good, as it relates specifically to quality, and the popularity of a thing. If there is one, it is most certainly a reverse correlation: the more popular something is, the more likely it is to be dumb, or mindless.
This is true in many aspects of life, not just in the arts or entertainment. It is virtually a given in culture and in politics that the most popular beliefs are the most dumb and the most in error. (The majority of people don’t want a particular religious sect to put up a community center near something they have been told is “hallowed ground,” but that doesn’t make them right. The majority of people believe it is appropriate and fair to deny equality of life to smaller group on the basis of sexuality, but that doesn’t make them right. The majority of people who voted wanted to see Bush elected to a second term, but that doesn’t make them right.) One can make a good bet that doing the right thing is whatever the most people oppose.
But that’s another topic altogether.
The history of philosophy — it’s what the field of aesthetics is all about — is riff with attempts to figure out and explain quality, what is good? Some fairly decent ideas have come out of these attempts. I go for the simplest of explanations. If it appeals to the thoughtless mob, it probably lacks much quality. If something is wildly popular and you cannot find any evident reason for it, then it probably lacks much quality. This works wonderfully with television — with the exception of the World Cup matches, of course.
Let me suggest something for us, which I believe will be difficult to sustain, but we should try. Even the youngest of us (who is that, anyway?) will not be alive in fifty or so years. We are not going to know and we are not going to participate in whatever culture is by then. We are not going to know if in 100 years Franzen is going to the 21st century Tolstoy, or a … who? It is what the world of art we participate in is like now and will be like in the next decade or two. Fahrenheit 451 could easily be prophetic, and there will be a tiny cult of 30 or 40 book lovers left in the world, the last vestiges of a literary culture that lasted centuries, holding on to words in books against the tyranny of Cyberspace. Maybe. But not now. Now is our neighborhood.
99.87% of all authors have suffered and are suffering these dilemmas, have suffered and are suffering the brutality of senseless rejection (which is rejection by accountant), but all go forward. Even when you “make it,” what have you made? I wrote on someone’s blog — was it Doug’s? I’ve forgotten — that in my total 30+ year career as an author, with eight novels published, I have earned around about $125,000. That is about $4,100 a year. Or $15,625 per book, most of which took many years to create. As I said elsewhere, that annual average is what wife’s gross income is every 10 days, or so. For only a two year period in the mid-80s did I live exclusively on my income as a writer. So we need to have some perspective about this thing we do.
If it’s about the money, then you can write what you want to write, and do the best job you can, and cut traditional publishing out of the loop; do it yourself with a quality printing company that will make a quality bound pretty book, and do the marketing and sales routine yourself. I bet you will make more money doing this than you would if Random House published it. So why not? Pure and simple: prestige. (Which you cannot eat, of course.) It is prestigious to have been professionally vetted, to have made your way through all the mundane gate keepers, to become one of those who made it, against all of those who did not. You will make much less money, but you will feel vindicated and, should I say, one of the elite.
It’s not really about the money, is it?
We are, especially you, Brad, Rose, Nicole … , the prisoners of our cultural histories, trapped by our expectations, set adrift by our dreams. In the real world as it is today, you wouldn’t even bother with the Random House model of publishing. But all of us are still wedded to the past.
This is what we should think about.
No, it’s not about money. Even if a debut novelist was accepted by a major house, the truth is that most of the marketing and so forth that’ll sell the book is the responsibility of the author anyway. Marketing money, for the most part, goes to known and verifiable commodities.
I think one can make more money self-publishing on the Kindle than they can going through the traditional route. And likely get more readers as well.
Court and I have had several emails discussions about this.
In the end, at least for me, it’s about ego. I’ve been wondering if I could let that aspect of myself go. Perhaps. But I need to try the other route first, right?
Damn, ego is a tough bitch.
Sure, Brad, give it a try. Why not try to garner a bit of prestige, and then, when you realize how badly these businesses have fucked you over, telling you to pay your bills with prestige, then you can decide what kind of audience you really want for your work, and what is the best way to find that audience.
But who am I to talk. I, who have 3 out of print novels that I again own full rights to, who has two as yet unpublished novels … see me on Kindle? See me self-publishing?
But you know, I am in another place from you guys. I have had the prestige, which is how I know you can’t eat it. I am tired of a lot of this and just don’t have the energy or the compulsion it would take to do for myself better than these businesses pretend to do for me and what they do is done so badly. If I were starting out, yes, I’d take a shot a the old way of publishing books, and then, unless I was wildly successful, I’d put my work in the places it would find the most readers (and tangentially, where the financial rewards for years of B S and T would be a little more fair).
And ego is the nastiest bitch out there.
What I really want to know is how many stories do you have to publish before girls start throwing their bras at you? That’s the real gauge of success, isn’t it?
I posted a photo of the reward for literary success over on my blog. Get yours now.
Brad- should have been a musician. Even a bad one gets bras thrown at him.
Who decides what is good writing?
Well, art is not objective Court. Literature is art. I remember listening to an interview with the bass player for the Meat Puppets a long time ago and he was asked what their lyrics meant. His reply was that if it reminded you of going to the mountains and camping, that’s what it was about.
There are numerous ways to judge the success of a piece of writing. Units shifted, awards won, number of hits for author on wikipedia, inclusion in high school or university curriculae, etc. I used to refuse to read pop fiction, thinking it below my sensibilities as a reader. Then I realized that, just like appreciating a song by Hanson, pop can be “good” as well. I find myself enjoying a lot more styles of books now, some for the stories, some for the style, some for the originality, etc. I also find that some books that I “should” like because of their pedigree I find utterly unreadable and lame. So it is I who decides what is good writing. And it is you. And Donnigan, and Brad, and my mom (who has read just about every book printed since the Book of Kells).
Honestly, I don’t think it goes any deeper than that.
Well, alright, but the books you read, at least the ones that you pay money for, are deemed to be “good books” by the various gatekeepers – literary agents and editors and ultimately beancounter accountants at multinational corporations. You get to decide after a whole bunch of people have already decided.
The internet offers the promise of liberating the reader and the author from all the middlemen but then who is going to sort out the dreck? Ultimately we need some sort of gatekeepers. I am more and more tending to think that the prototype of how this will ultimately develop is all those starred reviews on Amazon and like sites (but espcially Amazon, because of how many units they shift).
The people who care enough about books to leave a review, however brief and amateurish, on Amazon are the true readers, and I would like to think they will ultimately determine what is worth reading, and what is not. A sort of semi-democratic system if you will; “semi” because not everyone is willing or able to participate, but for those who do, everyone has an equal voice.
To Don’s points about being welded to the past, this remains true, for the time being. But as we often and elsewhere discussed, this is likely only a transistional time, and whatever is coming next is on its way, and none of us here will recognize it until it arrives, if we live that long. In time the prestige currently associated with being picked up by a major publishing house will fade in favor of something else. Maybe it will look something like the music scene these days, where the internet and YouTube and concert promotions have replaced CD sales as the revenue album for most but the biggest of stars. The problem with that analogy, of course, is that literature lacks the performance aspect of music.
I think Brad is right that in theory you can make more money with Kindle than the traditional publishing route. But we’re still talking pretty small amounts of money, at least for the kind of literary fiction of which we are practitioners. Not making a living kind of money, anyway. In which case the dayjob has to be kept, and what has changed?
Cory Doctrow said that the only fiction people care enough about to steal on the internet is science fiction. I suspect this is true. Does that mean you have to turn to sci-fi to make a living via the internet with writing? It might.
I wrote this to Cari over at my house. Might fit in here, too … :
Yes, I thought the cartoon was a perfect description of reality in the publishing business. Writers like you (and others among my regular readers) are at the beginning of the cartoon, while I (and too many of my writer friends) are at the end.
We at the end are still screwed, but at least, since we were around in the good old days, we have some of our books on shelves — before the accountants beheaded us. You, at the start, are doubly screwed; you never got a chance with the first book.
Talk about Catch-22 in action. You shouldn’t publish your first book because if it doesn’t sell well, you won’t get to publish your second book. Huh? Well, at least there would be one.
The dismal fact of the matter is, most, by a wide percentage most, writers of literary fiction do not sell in quantities large enough to satisfy the BookScan publishing conglomerate culture. Probably 90% don’t. Maybe one sells just well enough to try a second, but if that doesn’t surge over the BookScan cutoff mark, there won’t be a third — ever. You are essentially blacklisted by mainstream publishing corporations.
So why so many first novels? It doesn’t cost all that much to print a book, and even less to distribute some copies within an already well-established system, so it’s cheap to take a shot. You don’t have to publish a second book by these writers because there is an endless string of first novelists just waiting for their shot.
So there is this never ending string of young 1st novelists lined up to be next. The conglomerates are not going to run short of product if they don’t nurture and maintain the producers they already have. Supply is much greater than demand.
It costs them essentially peanuts to take a chance that one or two of those few thousand first novelists they put in print will satisfy the BookScan bottom line enough to justify trying one more. And who knows, they may get one J Franzan, who will make enough money to pay the bills for all those thousands of first novelists who “failed.”
That, my dear, is how it works. So proceed in wisdom.
Thoughtful post and comments.
It occurs to me that maybe the best thing for court to do is try to do a mass-appeal novel next, spend a year on it, and then try to put it out. If it works, good, and if it doesn’t he can go back to writing what he wants to write without worrying about what he could have achieved otherwise. Kind of an exorcism.
Thanks for the cartoon, Don. If it is true, as it most assuredly is, then Douglas’s earlier point over at his blog – that one ought to write without thinking of publishing – is also most assuredly true. It is a cold comfort but nonetheless comfort.
San Juan Boy, according to Don in the Postscript to the original post above, I’d be incapable of pulling a mass-appeal novel off. More cold comfort.
Although I’m still pondering trying it anyway. Like you said, just to see.
Continuing over here, where it more rightly belongs, from Doug’s school blog, more on what I would do if I were a young beginning writer today.
I think “publishing as we once knew it” is ending, maybe ended. I believe that the new model for book publishers will be Hollywood. Every once in a while a small, brave studio puts out an “art film” that gets some notice, but seldom earns back the money spent on it; most of the time Hollywood makes all its money from repeating well-known and tested stars and plots, always aiming for a blockbuster. Enough of these succeed that “Hollywood gets richer.” Of course there are dramatic failures, but the successes are so astonishing that they cover for the failures. And every now and then a really beautiful and creative film appears, and more rarely, makes a few cents over its costs.
This is book publishing now and in the immediate future. I’ll call it “New York,” in contrast with “Hollywood.” For New York, the accountants are only going to allow major money, major advertising, major marketing, to be spent on books the bean counters believe will become blockbusters. Along the way, maybe because otherwise the thoughtful workers in the industry would be too embarrassed to hold up their heads in the literary light of day, they’ll take a shot with some really fine, truly creative and brave, novel picked from one of the thousands that cross the transom. But they will not spend any money on the book, plopping it into the catch-22 category of forcing a failure from neglect. These failures are almost always fiat accompli, self-fulfilling prophecies.
The blockbusters that siphon off all the money for printing, marketing, advertising, and distributing, are, as in the Hollywood model, intended for the broad commercial market, which is always dumbed down.
It is actually something of a compliment that one’s work is not thought of as blockbuster potential — probably means it isn’t dumb enough to appeal to a mass audience.
This is the prologue to answering the question at hand, but since it is long, and people can’t generally read something longer than text messaging, I’ll break this here and start a new comment that speaks more directly to the question.
If I were a 25-something beginning writer today, I would simply forget about the New York publishing model. First, because what you think it is, it isn’t; used to be, but is no longer. So unless your literary ambitions are already inclined to the blockbuster Hollywood model New York has moved toward, you need to (I would need to) position yourself more effectively in the new Cyberspace world of writing.
I would participate fully in every social media site available, acquire as many “friends,” which basically translates to readers or followers, as I could pull in. I would put up a blog that used material attracting a large audience, that had enough controversy to get readers, and I would pepper the site with appropriate ads — this to help produce a little income to avoid a mind-numbing job. I would submit pieces to every substantial literary web journal, and participate in the discussions on those sites.
Then, assuming I have a novel ready, I would find an excellent copy editor to go through the mss looking for typos and errors, trying to produce a mistake-free copy. I would find the best of the self-publishers, or maybe just a good printer, and participate fully in the design of the final book, from cover, to font, to paper. I would get any reasonably well known literary figure from my excursions into social media, to read and offer a jacket blurb for the book.
Then, with the book printed, I would make as many deals for distribution as I could find, become my own press agent to get the book mentioned in as many places as I could; in other words, I would be my own marketing and advertising department. I would have contests on my blog for free copies.
Blah, blah, blah. I’m sure this idea is clear enough.
The first assumption here is that, at 25-something, I would have the energy to do all this. I can assure you that at my age I do not.
In the old New York ways, all of this was done for the author. If you are not capable of doing it for yourself, then you are wasting your time (and money) even bothering to make a book.
The old stigma of self-publishing and self-promoting is going to die at the same rate that traditional publishing shuts out new writers, or authors with “inadequate” BookScan numbers. I believe story-telling in the future is going to occur in Cyberspace, and through the fallout of Cyberspace.
That is what I would do.
I think some people in this little group here already do some of this and have started down this road — I think of Brad with his Facebook life, Rose with her self-publishing efforts and presence on so many literary web journals. But both of them are still trying to have it both ways — one foot in New York, one foot in Cyberspace.
Ironically, Cyberspace success with a book will probably have New York chasing you. You will have done all their work, and they can just tap into your ego and pick up the easy rewards.
I am glad I am not 25-something, but I would like to have as many years ahead to write as a 25-something is likely to have.
There are already those with the combination of innate ability and determination to both write and engage in some serious self-promotion. The trouble is, none of them that I’ve read seem to be very good writers.
But someone will come along who is. Who can somehow produce great writing and oodles of self-promotional material at the same time. Maybe that someone is already out there and I’m just not aware of him and / or her. Whenever and whoever, that person is the one who will conqueor this brave new world, I think.
Anybody know of anyone who’s making a good run at being that person now?
If you click my name, it’ll take you to my website where you can read a story about what happened when I had the world’s meanest boil on my ass. Feel free to friend me on Facebook or follow my Tweets, wherein I disseminate at least 240 characters of insight into literary affairs in the space of 140 characters. It’s truly something to behold.
Well, if it’s not you, Brad, it’s Tao Lin: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/24/tao_lin/index.html
Most of the talk about Tao Lin is about his antics to sell his books, not about his books. There’s remarkably little writing about his writing going on that I’ve seen. It’s working for him though. Even those that champion him, find it hard to speak in glowing terms about the actual writing. Almost everyone ends up speaking of him selling shares in his novel or his tricks to garner more hits to his website.
But perhaps he’s representative of the new consciousness. I sure the hell hope not though.
Yes, from what I’ve read of Tao Lin (admittedly little, since I can’t wade through it), the writing is subpar at best. Although evidently it has its fans. Well, so does everything.
Well, that’s him dismissed then. Any other candidates?
Who?
Why?
Don, Tao Lin has been decreed the next literary “it boy”. Mostly for his antics, like selling shares of his book and getting arrested in a NYU bookstore. His writing is not so hot, but evidently it appeals to the hipster readers – who knew there was such a thing, eh?
Here’s his blog. It’ll tell you about all you want to know. I suspect it won’t take you long to learn all you want to know.
http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com/
Here’s a profile that appeared on the Atlantic site:
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/08/terminal-boredom-reading-tao-lin/60437/
Don, Tao Lin has been decreed the next literary “it boy”. Mostly for his antics, like selling shares of his book and getting arrested in a NYU bookstore. His writing is not so hot, but evidently it appeals to the hipster readers – who knew there was such a thing, eh?
Here’s his blog. It’ll tell you about all you want to know. I suspect it won’t take you long to learn all you want to know.
http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com/
And here’s a profile that ran on the Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/08/terminal-boredom-reading-tao-lin/60437/