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Originally Posted by Sregener
In one sense, I thought your metaphor was right on. But this, I think, is just plain wrong. It isn't luck that he wrote a great novel that caught the attention of the gatekeepers.
The Author's Guild is a union, and unions always seek to protect the interests of their members, over-and-against the general public. Anything that makes it easier to compete with their Guild is a bad thing. Might as well call it the Author's Cartel.
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Notice I said he got lucky in "getting a sponsor".
I didn't say the book (PRESUMED INNOCENT) wasn't good.
Just that he was lucky to find a gatekeeper that liked his book right off the bat.
The luck comes in because at any point in time there have been dozens (hundreds?) of very good books bouncing around that don't get lucky in finding a sponsor willing to take them to market. (DUNE, Harry Potter, we all know a few, don't we? And those are the ones that eventually found a home...)
Writing a good book and trusting the universe to take care of you is a good prescription for obscurity.
The traditional road to publishing is a lottery system based on a fallacy: that agents and publishers can identify quality with something approaching accuracy.
History has shown that for every good book that has made it through the gantlet of trad-publishing, another gets bounced for no good reason and a whole bunch of mediocrities and outright poor efforts made it through.
At least with the new economics the odds of a good book finding its natural audience aren't constrained by the arbitrary tastes of gatekeepers or wave after wave of publishing fads.
Anyway, one thing Turow has achieved in riling up as many folks as he has is that the pushback has brought out a lot of different counters. One very interesting one I ran into a couple days back came with this quote:
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Traditional publishing set a benchmark for generations, and I along with many others believe that was not a good thing. “Classic authors” who defined the industry long ago, who became the foundation for fiction, were lucky they were born into the age that accepted them. They would be considered irrelevant today. Industry professionals now openly admit these celebrated authors would never be published in today’s market. Breaking in has become nearly impossible, breaking through holds the same odds as winning the lottery, and Breaking Dawn happened because of one fact - as the following industry professional will attest:
Embracing Marketability - Nothing has ever shaken my editorial self as much as this comment did. It came from an influential editor from a successful publishing company who was telling me about what to look at when considering a book. The advice had little to do with the uniqueness of the work, the style, the quality; instead it was all trends, what was in season. And then I was told to consider the appeal of the authors themselves—including their appearance.
Nina Hoeschele
Embracing Marketability
June 17, 2011
The Editing Company
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http://theromancetroupe.blogspot.com...etability.html
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Because I learned how the industry worked, I was rather pleased with myself in learning how to so artfully avoid the slush-pile, by submitting a query first and having the editor ask for my manuscript, I proudly stamped REQUESTED MATERIAL all over that huge envelope.
What I did not see then, I was in the slush-pile the entire time.
Why?
It wasn’t because my story was terrible, it wasn’t because I lacked talent. It was because my work didn’t fit their mold of marketability. Marketability, at that time, was that stereotype of the leads hating each other. The publisher knew it would sell as it had done before. My story - didn't have that, the publisher couldn't determine if my work would sell.
Traditional publishing has a formula and being a “good story” isn't a part of the equation. Stories don't have to be written well, they have to fit into the “proven” formula for marketing.
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Traditional publshing bandies about the whole "curators of culture" thing so often that, like most big lies, it has succeeded in obscuring the truth: book publishing is a commercial venture. And in all commercial ventures marketability is job one. Quality is *always* secondary.
And that is one thing that the ebook evolution is not changing; marketability (in the form of visibility, now) still rules. But the biggest change is that the marketability gate is now positioned *after* publishing not before.
Before, the gatekeepers could and did keep quality books from the market ("It's a good book but it doesn't fit our typical reader/profile/product line. Good luck finding a home for it elsewhere.") whereas now nothing can keep the story from the market. The new struggle isn't to get published but to get noticed. And the odds of that, if you have a good story with something meaningful to say, are much better. (In the sense that a small chance is better than zero chance.
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Traditional publishing is built around the (increasingly dated) concept of a publisher believing in a project enough to risk their money. They will only do that if they see a lot more money coming back in return. It should not be a surprise that big multinationals looking for tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in returns should be turning up their noses at authors and books that only generate revenue in the hundreds of thousands or that they prefer to look for books that might bring in millions instead.
Marketability, not quality, is the key to the kind of money their paymasters need to keep the beast fed. That is not necessarily evil, but their pretense that their intentions are no driven by a need for lucre are disingenuous and annoying.
And that kind of disingenuousness applies to the misnamed "AUTHORS GUILD" which is neither a guild nor a union nor is it concerned about protecting authors, these days--if it ever was. The AG is just a publishing industry Lobby Group.
And one of the curious aspects of their operation that is coming to light in the wake of the Turow pushback crap-storm is that the AG spends more to keep their doors open than they take in from their author "dues":
http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2...nt-care-about/
It has been suggested that a good chunk of their funding actually comes from the BPHs. Last I heard this was still being explored...
It is starting to look like the Turow op-ed may turn out to be a watershed event by drawing attention to things many would rather remain unexplored.