This just in: Publishing is a cartel

I have a post I’d like to write brewing somewhere in the back of my head. It’s about rules and craft and submissions and the industry and industry myopia, but the yeast hasn’t risen yet, so I’m holding off. In the meantime, I stumbled across this article from The Guardian, which says, in part (in response to a previously self-published author’s opinion that publishing is a cartel):

Every industry needs quality control. One thing that differentiates the
publishing world from, say, the medical world, is that stitching an
abdominal suture requires specific qualifications, whereas writing a
novel calls for skills which, though far less quantifiable, are
absolutely necessary for success. Just because hospitals lack the
resources to field hundreds of requests a week from people wanting to
perform open-heart surgery, it does not follow that the medical world is
some kind of shadowy clique.

It made me think of the old joke. So, a novelist and a brain surgeon are at a cocktail party. “What do you do?” asks the brain surgeon. “I’m a novelist,” the novelist says. “Oh,” says the brain surgeon. “I was thinking of taking the summer off and writing a novel.” “Funny,” says the novelist, “I was thinking of taking the summer off and being a brain surgeon.”

Ba-dum-bum-ching!

Naturally. as the daughter of a surgeon, I am not about to belittle the decade my father spent in hard core studying to learn how to save people’s lives. (Another blog topic: “Why I hate people who dismiss doctors”, but I digress.) However, I do think there is a certain dismissal of the idea that it takes serious skill and application to be a novelist because there is no set course for such a profession. Some people major in creative writing then go to fancy MFA programs and spend years honing their craft before they get soemthing through the gates, other people sit down in their basement with a notebook one day, and say, I want to write a novel, and through a combination of natural, God-given talent, dumb luck and yes, serious application, they write one and sell it.

The latter is probably the most damaging to my cause of getting people to realize how hard this is. Because there are people that just do it, without training or experience. And you can’t really say that about brain surgeons. But, do they really have no training or experience?

I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a pen. Growing up, I eschewed most organized sports and board games in favor of long sessions of “imagine” etc. In college, I spent long hours writing stories. I majored in literature. I read a ton. [Glances at wall covered in bookshelves.] Maybe two tons. I imagine these overnight successes had similar “training”.

Before we had schools, doctors and other trained technicians learned their craft through a complicated system of apprenticeship. They watched the masters, then the copied the masters, then they helped the masters, and then they did it on their own. Reading books is like watching the masters. Writing stories in the style of those whose voice you most admire is like copying them. Then, finally, you get to work on your own. Visual art has used this system. And it’s commonly held that many writers’ first attempts are derivative of whoever’s work they’ve most recently admired.

I think my path to publication falls somewhere in between the two extremes I mentioned above. I never attended an MFA program, but neither did I sit down and sell the first book I’d ever written. I’ve now written five novels. And after I decided to do this, joined RWA, and read everything I could get my hands on about how to write a book. I discarded a lot of it as utter crapola or too elementary to be of any use to me. (Oddly enough, I’ve never found a need to brush up on my ability to include conflict in my novels, which many writers struggle with. I knew intuitively — because of my long association with “masterworks” — that stories need trouble to be stories.) I recognized the value of certain teachings for other people, but already has a pretty clear idea in my head of what I knew and, more importantly, what I needed to learn. So that cut down a lot on what I still needed to do. There are certain mistaken beliefs that it’s a queue and it’s “not fair” when some people sell quickly and others don’t. Well, all that’s true, if you account for the fact that the starts are staggered and the finish line is a time warp. But I worked really hard on craft (by writing manuscript after manuscript) and business for the better part of three years.

And it’s good that it’s been working because, um… I don’t really have a back up plan. When I started this, and it became clear to my father that I wasn’t going to be published yesterday, he asked me how long I was going to do this before trying a real career. I told him that it had taken him four years to get through medical school. We hit four years since graduation in June, so I just made it under the wire. ::phew::

When I first started, at 23, I had ridiculous expectations about how long it would take. I figured one year to write and sell something, and then one year for it to be published. I wanted to have a book out by the time I was 25. Then I wanted to sell a book by the time I was 25. Then I wanted to sell a book when I was 25. Damn. I sold two books four months after turning 26, and they will be out when I’m 27. Could be worse. I’m told the average time it takes to sell a book is four years. I hate being average, but I’ll take it over delinquent.

Still, never once in all this time, did I believe publishing was a cartel. My books weren’t good enough, the agent was mistaken, the market wasn’t right, the editor was using crack… all of these things I thought. But I could write a better book, find an agent I meshed with more, look for a new market, outlive the editor* — in short, pull the bike up off the curb, brush the gravel from my skinned knees, and start again. I never got to the point where I thought that you coudn’t get in if you were new and unknown. And I don’t think I would. I’d think it was hard, but rightly so. We want to do something really really hard. And I knew too many people who were unconnected and just wrote a good story and followed the directions and submitted it and didn’t give up and sold it and are now authors.

Maybe I’ve been lucky. Maybe I joined an RWA chapter where everyone was treated with respect, no matter what their publishing credentials (I’ve heard tell of other chapters where pubbed members are gods and unpubbed members are the unwashed masses lucky to be allowed to gaze upon such splendor). I made friends with good people and good writers, I took advice from same, and I never bought into the idea that only a published person knew the magic handshake. (And, take it from one (Secret) Society Girl, they don’t teach you one when you are sold.) Some of the most talented writers I know remain mystifyingly unpublished, but I never thought of that any differently from another industry that makes a business error. A shoe store fails to stock the new thing in fall footwear, or a fast food chain is behind the times in the rise in health food.

From my limited experience int eh publishing industry, there’s nothing the agents and editors like *more* than finding a great new writer. I think they like it even more than picking up a great established author (which they love). We’re a nation of discoverers, it’s a cultural fantasy.

Do I know why these great books that get passed over get passed over? Lord no. But I do know that it’s not on purpose.

_______________________
*Which I have.