Traditional Publishing's Product: Excuses to Give Up
Most books fail. Too many are written. The correlation between quality and sales outcomes is either zero or negative. It is something like religious mania that drives people to write and publish books, even though the median outcome is dismal.
On June 7, a querying author tweeted the following:
I hate feeling like self-publishing is "giving up" but the idea of my baby just rotting away on my hard drive forever kills me.
Maybe I'm a fool for thinking my first novel would get anywhere.
I don't know what to do honestly.
Traditional publishing’s Stockholm Syndrome is so pervasive that people fall into it before they even sign a book deal. He says he’s been querying for four years, and unfortunately I can tell you why he hasn’t had success: he uses the #amquerying hashtag on Twitter. Writers, don’t do that. Publishing is not about writing or literature. It’s about leverage and social status, of which you have neither as an unknown author, but announcing to the world that you are querying moves your social status from zero to negative. If you choose to pursue the query process, and have the $25,000 or so (it’s a stochastic toll road, so treat that number as an estimate) that it’ll cost to actually get pages read, then go ahead and do it, but keep it a secret like all other embarrassing bodily functions.
I would also advise against referring to one’s novel as “my baby.” People who have children will react negatively in one way, and people who don’t have children will react negatively in a different way. It charms nobody.
Is self-publishing giving up? No. Is querying giving up? No, although most agents will say behind closed doors that anyone who must rely on query letters should give up, because desperation stinks. Giving up is giving up. And also, giving up is often smart. Commercial novelists learn with time not to be emotionally attached to their stories; if one story is not selling, give up on that project and write another. There is a 99 percent chance that, at some point in your life, you will be putting primary focus into something other than the story you are writing—revising it will be unnecessary or unhelpful; marketing it will be unprofitable; you’ll simply have other interests. There’s nothing wrong with that.
And yet we reach an insight that is paradoxically opposite of the claim that traditional publishing has worked very hard to push. You can self-publish and give up, but self-publishing makes it harder to do so. As a self-publisher, there’s always another strategy to try. The book is never conclusively dead; it’s always potentially pre-successful. Traditional publishing is where you go for permission to give up. And they will freely give it.
I’m not going to lie. Almost every author would take a traditional deal if the terms were right. I fucking hate traditional publishing, and I would; that said, deals at the level I would seriously consider are numbered in the dozens per year, and I don’t have the Epstein-tier wealth and connections that would ever get me read by agents or editors who have the power to even consider them. Self-publishing is difficult, time-consuming, and often extremely inefficient—writing cold emails in one’s forties feels like failure, and maybe it is, but well-connected publicists are expensive. It would be far easier to live in an alternate universe where institutions actually work, decision-makers have what it takes intellectually to recognize real text, and authors who should have audiences built for them get the service organically rather than having to invest five or six figures upfront. The temptation to just ignore reality and pretend we are in such a place is strong.
Traditional publishing is engineered to give people reasons to give up. The query letter is an auxiliary skill that, because serious writers universally regard it with contempt, serves a design purpose; once people are forced to do jobs they’re bad at—doers of work are always bad at selling it, and vice versa; there are well-studied neurological reasons why this is the case, and the insight goes back to Plato—they will accept unfavorable results they would otherwise recognize as unjust. And for those who secure book deals, giving up becomes respectable. The book was submitted and published, but reviews did not come, sales were lousy, and the author’s only hope of publishing another one is to hack or bomb BookScan. But no one will question the decisions of a published author, especially one who didn’t have to make any. Everyone “did the best they could” and it just did not pan out; it becomes an accepted fate.
A really stupid thing people say to excuse a dictator is that, while his actions are reprehensible, “at least he is doing things.” With traditional publishing, you will “at least” get a decision. You will get no evidence that any thought was put into that decision, and in most cases the absence of evidence is correctly taken as evidence of absence, but you will have an excuse to quit forever. You thought you had something to say; now you know better.
Traditional publishing is where you go if you want to abandon responsibility for your own outcomes. If you get a lousy deal, your work was judged by the enlightened masters not to merit more. If your manuscript is taken up by an agent and dies on submission, you take her word that those seven editors really did engage with the text but found nothing to like.
This is all true on the reader’s side as well. If the people who are trusted to deliver the best books written every year seldom find anything good, it must mean there’s nothing good out there, no?
If you’re looking for an excuse not to believe in yourself, the best company you could seek is that of people who believe in nothing.
I think that traditional publishing can give writers a socially acceptable reason to stop. A rejection feels official. Self-publishing is harder in one sense because the book is never quite dead unless you choose to abandon it.
Well, this got me thinking about my case. What do I do? I read my stories to people I know, online, and more frequently in recent times, in person. I read my work to people who don't write and others who do. I fill little hungry spaces in their minds, and it pleases them. What do they do? Sometimes, they invite me to coffee or lunch or they make me dinner. They give me things. My writing becomes a kind of human exchange. And I think, isn't that worth continuing to write and a worthy reason to call myself a writer? I don't need money from writing. I know what I do is very small scale. The world is full of writers all screaming "Go big or Go Home." Their ambition is to change literature or define literature in a new way. Fine. I may well do that just by continuing to write every day without even meaning to. Anyway, my understanding of what a writer is might be older than the current one. For most of human history, stories circulated differently. A story told to ten people was still a story and it still spread. We could use more of an oral tradition right now.
My point is that it's time to start thinking past prestige hierarchy to new forms of circulation. This place is sort of functioning as that and a distribution channel too, although I don't place too much faith in it, since it could enshittify at any moment. It's like an old-fashioned literary salon morphing into a literary metropolis. This feels more alive than trad pub, though.