An Anonymous Publishing Person Weighs In & Another New Blog

The following is an interesting response to my post from yesterday about the article in the Bookseller.

I have to say that there's an element of this kind of story (the one you linked to in the Bookseller) with which I profoundly disagree.

I don't think that as an industry we need to publish books
specifically directed at perceived consumer reading interests any more than we so obviously already do (for those of you who doubt that publishers do care about the public's reading interests, consider how many Ivy educations go into the publication of romance novels; do you think the high volume of romances published today are solely a function of the reading interests of the intellectual class?).

Rather, what we do need to do is to sell the reading public (and better yet the non-reading public) our books. Not some books that we think we're making just for them. That's a critical distinction. To do that, yes, it's imperative to have a better sense of what readers believe they want -- but that doesn't mean, actually, that they know what they want.

We can complain all we want about the ubiquity of The Da Vinci Code (this week's New Yorker cartoon) sums it up, but what's interesting is that this is a classic publishing success story. It's about an author who wrote the book he wanted to write (yes, commercial, but clearly what he wanted, not what the market seemed to be demanding), an editor who was passionate and committed enough to ignore what the market seemed to be saying about the author, and a publisher with the vision to market the book aggressively. It's not about going to Omaha and finding out what suburban housewives "think" they want to read.

Do you really think that market research would have revealed a deep consumer desire for a book about Leonardo, codes, the Catholic church, conspiracies, and the early history of Christianity? Please. Ex post facto, sure, we all recognize that these aspects of the book were marketable, indeed supremely marketable. But that's ex post facto. Ultimately, as I implied above, readers only know what they want -- in specific terms -- after they've had it.

Aesthetic businesses have to rely on taste for decision making. And I'm not going to apologize for the fact that we're a business comprised of folks from the educated classes -- and that our tastes reflect that. This doesn't mean we don't strive to do big business or that we're ashamed of publishing "commercial" authors and genres. We're not. But taste is taste, and since democracy manages to elect George Bush president, I don't see how more "representative" publishing is good for anyone.

Call me an elitist. I recognize that even my George Bush example illustrating the limitations of market choice paints me as a blue stater so blind to the reality that there are millions of Americans who actually did vote for the guy -- and who wanted to -- that I'm hopelessly incapable of believing that we should "give people what they want." But I'm unapologetic and, furthermore, unrepentantly convinced that, on a macroscopic level though not necessarily on an individual book level, the way we decide which books to publish -- by trusting both our own tastes and our own sense of marketability -- makes both for good aesthetics and for good business.

Overnight Success Stories

The critic and crime fiction blogger, David J. Montgomery has gathered some fascinating overnight success stories at his new blog.

In his own words: "The enduring myth of the overnight success is as old as publishing itself. Although a fortunate few have managed to thwart the odds, for most writers the road to publication is long and arduous. Here are some of their stories, in their own words…"

(I'm proud to be included on the list.)

Comments

[Soniah Kamal]

Another word of mouth success story is Khaled Hosseini's 'The Kite Runner'.

[Emmett Grogan]

Re: Anonymous Publishing Person

Wow. You know what I get out of that commentary? "I'm a snob and proud of it."

It's elitist jerks like her/him that drive so many good writers into POD because they can't get a hearing from snap-decision snobs like that. Add to that the greedhead agents who only care about their next fat payday, and you have the roots causes of the sorry state of publishing today.