Dark Thoughts

Those who know me know how disenchanted I am with the publishing business. It is not, my friends, like it was for Louisa May Alcott, who took her precious manuscript “Little Women” to a publisher in Boston and who was thereafter taken care of like a precious asset. Publishing is now an ethically murky business where the worth of a manuscript is not at issue, only how many sales they can make in six months. After that, the book is dead in the water, due to the chimeric tastes of the reading public.

Recently we were watching one of my favorite shows “The Graham Norton Show” where the host was interviewing a number of celebrities. Quite frequently the celebrities seem to have been chosen because they have just released a movie or just published a book. Last week it was Matthew McConaughey, who has done both. My comment to my husband was: “As if he didn’t already have a world stage, and as if he didn’t already have a net worth in the millions.” I admit this sounds like sour grapes, because it is. His book, of course, will sell like hot cakes and he will have had no trouble finding a publisher. He probably had a bidding war with high and ever higher offers of a publishing advance.

I do sound bitter, don’t I?  The reality is that it is so hard for an unknown writer to get a foothold in today’s publishing marketplace, even if you’ve done it once before. The publishing business today has very little to do with literary worth and is more about the quick buck. And I do understand that it’s a business, it’s just that like a lot of things that have been around for many, many years, I think the world of good novels is in its dying days. Readers want only entertainment and publishers want only profits.  

I hasten to add that I’m not claiming to have written a literary masterpiece in Bound by an Oath, but it is a lot better than a lot of the stuff that is out there, even many of the books on the New York Times best seller list. My daughter recently showed me a book she had borrowed from the library. She commented that it was poorly written, and the plot was simplistic. She said that my book was much better! The novel she was struggling to read was not the author’s first novel, but it was, however, on that “list”.

As you know, I am currently sending my novels “Laughing at the Time to Come” and “Phoebe Earns a Nickname” out to agents and publishers. So far there have been no bites, which is disappointing, and despite what some publishers have claimed, finding a publisher does seem to be more about who you know than it is about what you have written.

One of my biggest criticisms of my publisher and others too, because I don’t think this is an isolated phenomenon, is that there is no transparency between publisher and author. The author does not know how many copies were sent to booksellers and cannot be sure how many have actually sold. You must trust the numbers that they feed back to you at the end of the royalty period. And I’m afraid I don’t. That is why, despite the bad reputation of self-published authors and the attempts by traditional publishers to bar them from competitions and awards, I am seriously considering that it might be the better way.

I plan to send my manuscripts to a few more agents and publishers and then get back to working on the sequel to Bound by an Oath, which I am longing to do.

Meanwhile I wake each morning hoping for a day without international incident, or too many gun deaths in our own country. (I long since gave up hoping for a day without any gun deaths at all.) My requirements for a pleasant and contented life have changed a lot in the last year.

I apologize for the grimness of this blog post. I’ll try and do better next week, because I know we are all thirsty for goodness, kindness, and something positive to hope for, and those things do exist! Tomorrow is another day.