This week at the KR blog Maggie Smith linked to a piece by Steve Almond on DIY publishing. Almond (as you may know) has published fiction and nonfiction with big publishers, and he has also self-published several works that he sees as having a naturally smaller audience, and which he sells himself, in person, for cash (the “Drug Dealer model,” as he calls it). On big publishing, his piece notes:
What this model conveniently elides is the publishing industry’s fundamental flaw: it weds an artist to a corporation.
Sometimes, this marriage is a very happy one indeed. More often, there’s tension from the start. This tension isn’t anyone’s “fault.” It arises from an inevitable conflict of motives. The writer wants most of all to make art. The corporation wants most of all to make money.
I have worked at a small press for seven-plus years. My co-worker and co-editor, Pam Thompson, is also a novelist (published by the wonderful independent Unbridled Books). I am in the first stages of sending out a novel, and as I mull over how I’d like to go about this process, I think of the authors, translators, and agents with whom I’ve worked as an editor, and am in conversation with colleagues from the MFA program at UMass Amherst. Many of these MFA colleagues bemoan the stereotype of fiction writers sending out work: aim high, then see where you fall–get an agent, try the bigger houses, and then if you end up somewhere smaller, that’s great too. But even those of us who wince a bit at this idea may feel tempted by it, since it can seem the clearest path for an emerging fiction writer to follow.
I don’t really want to meditate here on my own publishing angst, which doesn’t seem that interesting and which you can more or less imagine, but rather on what this situation for “emerging” writers reflects about the state of fiction publishing generally. For some time now, there has been a lot of concern about the so-called death of the midlist–see, for instance, this article in Publishers Weekly, which in fact begins:
The midlist is dying. That sentiment has been a mantra in publishing circles for years as agents, authors, and editors have decried that corporate publishing will no longer support the kind of author that was once an industry staple–the moderate success who was a consistent seller, if not a bestseller.
The author goes on to give some figures:
With the “big six” demanding bigger sales numbers from all their authors, indie presses, which have long been the province of riskier, harder-to-market literary fiction, are finding that more commercial writers are showing up at their doors, as well as writers with serious accolades and lengthier track records.
One shift is that the definition of the midlist author has changed. A number of agents and publishers interviewed said when editors at the big houses look at the sales performance of an author’s last book in considering acquiring that author’s new book, the number they need to see is bigger than it used to be. While it’s been rumored that a publisher at one of the major houses told his staff they couldn’t acquire authors whose last book sold fewer than 50,000 copies, most sources said they thought the so-called “magic number” was closer to 25,000 or 30,000. One agent, noting that there’s far more variation at the paperback imprints of the big six, said most hardcover publishers today “would settle for 20,000.”
20,000 is of course much higher than most small presses ever see with the majority of titles; small-press print runs are often 5,000 or 10,000 at the most, and quite often less than that (although what’s a “first print run” really mean these days, as others have noted, given the ease of reprinting and the multiple options–eBook, POD–available“?) Many small press editors quoted in the PW article, which is titled “Smaller Presses, Bigger Authors,” feel that they have been the beneficiaries of this trend, signing authors who once would have gone to big houses.
Although small presses give less money upfront, their model is more viable for a lot of fiction. The same book that disappoints by selling only 10,000 to 15,000 copies at one of the big six is a big hit at a small press, and that, many small press publishers noted, often leads to a happier author. At Akashic, for example, the author gets a bigger split on royalties to make up for the small advance, and this means, [Johnny] Temple noted, that when a book actually sells, the author starts to reap the benefits.
The press where I work has been just such a beneficiary, signing authors whose earlier work was published by large houses. It has also has–nicely, I think–gotten to play the opposite, traditional small-press role, publishing a challenging work of debut fiction, which received good reviews and then allowed its author to go somewhere bigger for her next book. But sometimes we’ve watched, frustrated, as those authors have later had to move from house to house, or the paperback rights that were purchased from us were remaindered all too soon–when they didn’t prove a hit instantly, they were abandoned. Like many small presses, we pride ourselves on long-term commitments to our writers and not letting books go out of print.
So while we editors may be happy to be a beneficiary of this trend, which brings fantastic writers to our doors, that doesn’t mean that the whole scene isn’t worrying. Also worrying is how few of the major US publishing houses are now independent–most are now owned by multinational media corporations, of which they are then only one small wing. It’s worrying how willing publishers can be to abandon writers whose sales figures weren’t high enough, and that, as in the past fifteen years publishers and imprints have been bought and sold, broken up and folded into other houses, it’s the writers who are often left behind. This is where the essential tension Steve Almond describes–between artist and corporation–seems particularly disturbing (that and some of the editing suggestions he mentions in the article, a brand of censorship in the name of “consumer-friendliness”).
Many of the writers who are my mentors and heroes have in fact experienced just this fate (I won’t say suffered this fate–who says it’s suffering?): their first one or two books were published by a big house and received reviews in major venues; but when it was time for the next book, perhaps their editor had left, or the house itself had been sold, profit???loss margins had become just a bit more important, and their sales figures were looked at with a newly critical eye. In any case, they weren’t welcome at the old house and are now at smaller houses–which in some cases they found themselves, through their own reputations, without the assistance of their agents. This isn’t a sad story: they are publishing extraordinary work with excellent small presses.
But it’s true that their new books are less likely to be reviewed in the New York Times or, ultimately, to be read by as many people–or at least, it may take more years and a bit more luck for those readers to gather and start to add up. Is that a significant loss, does that matter to art–their art, or art generally? I don’t know–and luckily, I’ll still read these writers. But if I weren’t working in the small-press world, and hadn’t attended an MFA program, which functions in part as a network by which non-bestselling writers are read and recommended (and their books sold), I’m not sure that I would know to–rather, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t. (I know–there’s the internet, true. But would I go to certain sites if I didn’t hear of them through these in-person networks? I don’t know. I think I would probably pick up a few things I’d heard of here or there, but I would hear of fewer books overall, and would largely follow mainstream review-venue recommendations, which traditionally overlook small-press titles.) All this seems like a loss. It also seems worrying that mid-career writers of great accomplishment can so easily be left homeless.
A recent interview with Ethan Nosowsky of the stellar independent Graywolf Press discusses some of these matters, as well as the new role of social media in publicizing books. Of the swiftly changing review-venue landscape, Nowosky notes: “The sales numbers for a well-reviewed, voice-driven literary novel are not radically different for that kind of book than they were fifteen years ago, but you have to work a lot harder to get that number, and you’re reaching out to a lot of places that didn’t exist fifteen years ago.” The interview also discusses matters of small vs. large:
MW: What are the advantages of being published by a small press vs. a larger press?
EN: A lot more personal attention from your editor to your publicist. You’re more likely to get a higher level of editorial engagement. You’re more likely to be involved in the entirety of the publication process. We let the authors have some input on the jacket design, we try to be transparent about our publicity plans, we’re just very involved very often. “ The other thing is that for certain kinds of books that might be more literary or darker or unconventional in some way, they can get lost on a larger list at one of the larger houses. They tend to stand out more on our list and we know what to do with them, how to handle them. Bigger houses tend to print the book rather than publish it. For certain books where we might be stretching to compete with a moderate advance at a larger house, it means a lot to us, and it might get published more aggressively by us.
MW: What’s the average advance for a Graywolf book?
EN: Our advances for fiction and nonfiction tend to range from $5000 to $20,000. A third of our list is poetry, a third fiction, and a third nonfiction. At big houses, advances go into the stratosphere, but I’d say for the kinds of books that we publish that might also be at home at literary imprints at big houses, they can be comparable. We often pay less, and we lose a lot of books not irregularly because they’re willing to pay more for them, but I used to lose books at FSG (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) to bigger houses all the time. There’s often someone willing to pay more than you for a book. That’s just part of being in the business.
It’s interesting to note that although Graywolf does accept unagented submissions, Nosowsky considers agents an essential part of the process, and almost all the fiction Graywolf publishes is agented. This is something I’ve wondered about–there are great agents who work closely with smaller houses, but these agencies can’t be sustained by a percentage of advances of $1,000 to $10,000. They have to rely on other kinds of books, and on film and foreign rights, to provide the bulk of their income. This seems to me something of a hybrid state–agents are still necessary in the structure of much of the independent fiction publishing world, but that world does not sustain them financially; big publishing does.
There’s some conventional wisdom that in publishing, success should be defined as “losing money responsibly.” This is a pleasing but old-fashioned idea–it won’t work for those houses now owned by Rupert Murdoch, Bertelsmann, and Time Warner, and it can’t even work that well for smaller places or nonprofits, which have to find some way of getting all the bills paid, in an age when more and more sales are made through Amazon and chain stores that get increasingly larger discounts, and when chain stores are, to put it mildly, reluctant to stock and feature small-press books. Of the changes in the editor’s role in the past fifteen years, Nosowsky says, “Editors have to be much more cognizant of the marketing and publicity equation of books they are going to acquire,” and notes that, in his opinion, “the bigger publishers are becoming a lot more conservative. Knopf, Viking, and FSG are all still publishing fantastic books, but they aren’t as willing to take as many chances.”
In the face of all this, one can see why the DIY approach is appealing. So as an editor, reader, and writer I wonder: if the market is going to leave much of literary fiction behind, what can we do to ensure that it not only survives, but thrives? That we’re not left with only the safer books being published, and the largest houses receiving most of the attention, even as independent houses take on a wider range of writers and assume a larger role in the publishing landscape? I’m thinking about this, too, in the context of the recent discussion of the VIDA statistics–see Ruth Franklin’s round-up of male/female author ratios at both major and smaller houses: not encouraging on either front. If publishers become more conservative, some writers are going to get left out more often than others.
Poetry publishing has already had to move forward acknowledging that there will never be much money to work with, and authors will never get paid much. This leads to other issues (for instance, the central role of contests and reading fees), but faced with the current situation for fiction–in which small publishers must rely for sales on venues such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders (well, we’ll see about Borders“), enormously powerful corporations whose interest in, say, literary debut fiction is definitely secondary to their interest in their profit margin–I start to wonder about those places that are thriving outside of or despite all that. Which is why I started with the question: What can fiction publishing learn from poetry publishing?
This is more than can be answered in one already long post, so I’ll stop here for now, and continue next week. Comments welcome!