PUB 101: "Writer's Digest"

Normally I don’t bother to buy “Writer’s Digest” after reading over the years a zillion little peppy articles about how to improve and sell one’s writing -- all by writers who have no intention at all of telling you the REAL truth of how they do it themselves. (Hint: you can make a living selling writing about writing to wannabe writers.) But I picked up the July/August issue in Great Falls with the thought that it might be a way to find an agent. There was also an article about how to get along with a collaborating co-writer that turned out to be totally useless in the case of Barrus and I. We just don’t work the way described, which was for fiction-writing anyway.

There was another useless article about what is evidently a hot topic in some circles: whether a writer should get an MFA or a Ph.D. to be a famous best-selling author. The question is phrased as “which should be your terminal degree?” which sounds a bit ominous. I hope readers realize that academic degrees are another marketing ploy. They might qualify you to teach (another way to not make money), but they don’t address writing beyond research and clarity.

I was interested that the NPR contest for a 3-minute short story, which was judged by an academic, had a strong odor of workshop. It was a fey little story about watching a neighbor kidnap ducks in the street and then about the state of his room after he left. The judge fell in love with the description of his abandoned socks, one under the bed and the other “curled up and shrinking like a salted slug.” A salted slug does NOT look like a shucked-off sock in a knot. Salted slugs writhe. Sock knots stay the same size. I don’t get it. The odor of socks was not mentioned.

The article about Anne Tyler was nice but totally irrelevant, except that we would all like to be Anne Tyler because 1) she writes well, 2) she writes a lot, 3) her readers are faithful, 4) she’s only had one publisher/editor (at Knopf) and has only visited their offices twice, 5) she got on this train fifty years ago when things were far more rational, 6) she’s 67 and still looks like a “chick,” 7) she pays no attention to how she does it -- as all these WD articles would encourage her to do -- and just DOES it, 8) she's "hilarious and heart-breaking." By the way, she doesn’t like blurbs, doesn’t like to write them, and doesn’t think writers should be forced to solicit them rather than some publicist.

Publishing has become increasingly feminized even in terms of metaphors. When Tyler was asked what her next book would be about, she said she felt like a woman who had just had a baby -- not willing to consider whether to get pregnant again. Earlier one of the article writers said that getting published was not like giving birth (which one of my publisher’s staff cooingly suggested) but rather like giving birth and having the infant ripped from your arms to be given over to a total stranger. Someone else suggests that writing has been as mythologized and romanticized with as little insight as parenthood has.

The really valuable part of this issue is a cluster of articles called “Publishing 101,” which is like a guide to parenting AFTER all the labor and cuddling. The REAL nitty-gritty: diapers, discipline, and nasty little discoveries. Buy this mag, tear out this section and put it in plastic sleeves in a binder so you can reread it many times. Take it to heart.

One veteran suggests that publishers' acquisition of books is rather like throwing a handful of pencils at the ceiling to see which ones stick in the acoustic tile. Then in the next year throwing up another handful of pencils. All the really important winnowing is done before the pencils ever get to the publisher.

Expect to pay for your own research. One writer spent her entire advance on marketing research which is the really crucial element, not that anyone has a clue what makes for valid marketing research. Mostly it seems to consist of descriptions of what has already sold well, which has little to no relevance to the future. YA, Chick-lit, Millennials (Gen Y) and other categories that are arbitrary and invented mill around in the speculations.

Fussing over your book cover is useless. It’s all based on market research and if they say only Westerns with gunslingers on the cover will sell, that’s what will be on the cover. They know better than you, even if there is NO gunslinger in your Western.

The ghost of remainders -- printing too many books or distributing too many books so that they are sent back unsold -- still haunts the industry but they still have no thought of print on demand. They are like Mother Nature: produce a thousand bugs and then eliminate ninety-percent of them. But Mother intends the bugs to be eaten by bigger bugs anyway, not to be pulped because everyone has lost interest. Publishing still thinks Darwin is about survival of the fittest (highest sales producers) instead of the fittingest and still thinks that fittingness can be defined by a guy in an office running numbers on his desk computer, who would have eliminated every single American Transcendalist writer in favor of housekeeping advice.

Your most important creation as an author is NOT the book itself, but rather your platform: your reputation, your penetration of the demographic of readers, your genre. If you can hire your own publicist, do it. Your publisher is busy. In fact, that seems to be the chief marker of publishers -- they’re too busy for authors. Authors are product. (Insert image of chicken factory.) The very numbers of them guarantee this.

What publishers do is have conferences, which is a meeting where authors are not allowed, where the chickens meet their fate. The editors present the “platforms” of the books they have chosen and the salesmen respond with their idea of what will work. Changes may be made at this point, but the real point is to select the few works that will probably sell and which will be allotted the most effort and money. No one will actually read have read the books, which explains a lot.

Some people almost swoon when you say you’re an author. Their next question is always, “Published?” Instead of answering with a sensible return question which might be more like, “what do you mean?” or “why do you ask?” just say yes. It saves a lot of fuss and trouble. Then you can get back to improving your platform. (The Writer’s Digest for the just previous issue is supposed to focus on this.) What they really want to know is "how well do you sell?" not "how well do you write."

If you're a writer who is feeling burnt and want a little higher octane version of this line of thought, try the vid at http://www.blip.tv/file/1912191/ Be warned: there's cussing.