![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
Disclaimer: I don’t work in publishing. I’m not going to pretend that I have a thorough understanding of the business. I’m fairly sure no-one does. I don’t think that paying attention to the publishing industry has given me some unique insight. It’s not like I work for a government contractor.
There are problems in the publishing industry. Unless you’re writing iambs by candlelight with a feather quill from your pet dodo, you probably know what a few of these problems are. Likely, you’ve also whined, grandstanded, and otherwise complained over these problems in coffeeshops, writing classes and convention after-parties, coming to no conclusion other than that the industry must be run by retards.
It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that you have come up with a solution to the problems that is both a) practical, and b) hasn’t already been considered, tested or enacted by someone in a position to make a difference.
Arrogance is okay, though. It takes a special kind of arrogance to believe anyone wants to read your work. But if that arrogance extends to thinking everyone in publishing is stupider than you, and your only contribution is unoriginal, unworkable ideas, then you’re just like every other schizophrenic barfly who thinks he’s running for President.
The problems in publishing tend to break down into four categories, depending on who they affect:
Readers: Books are more expensive than they used to be, so many to choose from, this book sounds interesting but I don’t know if I’ll like it enough to buy it new, the new book by Favourite Author sucks compared to their earlier stuff, no-one’s writing the books I want to read, these authors are all so rich they don’t understand me anymore, I could write a better book by squirting ink out of my ass.
Publishing Industry Professionals: Paper costs rising, reading audience declining, annual profits not rising fast enough, no one buys short story magazines anymore, hard to differentiate new product in crowded marketplace, hard to stay two years ahead of the trends, authors are egomaniacal crybabies who think our job is to print money for them, I should just write a book myself.
Published Writers: Publishers only care about Big Name Author, they won’t pay for me to stay in nice hotels while I bitch about doing signings, the Borders in Bumfsck Iowa won’t stock my book, NYTBR won’t return my calls, I can’t feed my 87 cats on this advance, my royalty check seems to be missing a few zeros, I think I could’ve been a lawyer, what do you mean I have to wait for returns?
Unpublished Writers: Help! I’m drowning in the slushpile! Won’t someone please validate me? There must be a way I can bypass actually writing a good book and get into print quickly so I can show all those haters who don’t know who the fsck I am.
Unpubs tend to focus on the slushpile, not because it’s the worst problem (it isn’t), but because it’s their interface with publishing, the Iron Gates of Approval that they’re desperate to sneak under. Of course the slushpile is broken, if they don’t immediately receive a grovelling acceptance engraved into a gold ingot. “Reclaim the slushpile!” they cry. “Asylum doors stand open! Change the system, so that my crap gets in.”
Of course the response from the publishing industry is silence. Or a form letter containing a transcription of silence. Because as far as the industry is concerned, the slushpile isn’t broken. Good writing stands out like the effervescence of a just-opened Perrier bottle when you’re standing in a lake of fermenting pus. (It could happen, and you’ll want a Perrier when it does.)
It’s possible, even likely, that publishing will change dramatically in the coming years. But the slushpile ain’t going away anytime soon, and the other problems really ain’t yours to fix.
Imagine for a moment that every problem in publishing was solved. Readership doubled, and doubled again. Improved, targeted marketing allowed every reader to find books they wanted, and those readers bought more books. Sales went through the roof. Advances and royalty payments got sweeter and sweeter. Ten times as many books were published.
There will still be more manuscripts written than there are readers interested in reading them.
Even if no-one else took up the pen, the odds on publication might shorten from 1000-to-1 down to 100-1. That’s still 99% rejection. If there was a proportional increase in new writers, agents would needs teams of slush readers to comb through hundreds of thousands of submissions.
Or imagine that magically, writers everywhere start improving. They hone their talent, postponing submission until they’re convinced that their work is as good as they can make it. But the market can only support so much product. More rejection slips are handwritten, and the books that make it are great, but …
The song remains the same.
Really, the “problem” of the slushpile could be halved, overnight, if agencies started insisting that every submission be accompanied by a signed statement reading “I have read and adhered to all the submission guidelines”, and trashing any submission that doesn’t.
Since that isn’t going to happen, you might as well just “write a better book”, or get used to disappointment. Or just stop writing, and make a real difference to the slushpile.
If you think you can fix publishing, you need to do a couple of things:
If you’re not prepared to take these steps, you’re just adding more noise to a discussion already choked with a million little whiners.
At least you’re not writing. There isn’t any problem in publishing bigger than your craptacularity.
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To be fair, while many of the ideas being dropped over and over again are ones that were murdered in their sleep back in the Fifties, I’ve also noticed that many are perfectly valid ones that won’t be touched because of a judicious application of Riddell’s Law. For instance, some of the people who bitch the loudest about the pathetic distribution and circulation of science fiction magazines are those who’d be “flushed into the Thames with the other turds” if said magazines actually became successful.
By way of example, I spent two years researching possible alternatives to standard genre magazine distribution, and one of the things that kept coming up was that the Big Three (Analog, Asimov’s, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) are still in digest format when almost every other magazine on the planet left the cheap newsprint format decades ago. Bookstores hate them because they keep getting lost in the waterfall racks, they’re usually only picked up by Cat Piss Men who also pick up the latest issue of Writer’s Digest to go with it, and they take up space that could be better utilized if they went to a standard magazine format. When I brought this up with various editors and readers, I was told repeatedly “Well, Analog tried going to a standard magazine format at the beginning of 1966, and it didn’t work.” (My immediate response was “Hm. Gee, what was I doing at the beginning of 1966? Oh, yeah: I was sucking down amniotic fluid like a fish and kicking the hell out of the inside of my mother’s uterus. Since I obviously haven’t adapted to changing conditions, why should I expect a magazine to do the same?”)
That’s why I stopped giving a damn about what happens to genre magazines, because any energy that could be put into establishing a replacement for existing distribution chains instead goes into desperate attempts to protect the practice of putting “Member, SFWA” on manuscripts to get them through the slush pile. Science fiction magazines have gone the way of plastic model kits: once an interest of children and adolescents, they’re now horribly expensive habits of man-children who complain about how the old companies in the business should be “brought back” even though nobody but them wants them to return. Skiffy magazines hold about as much influence in chain bookstores as plastic model kits hold in chain hobby stores, and it’s just a matter of time before they fade out entirely, as their proponents die or get lives.