The Cottage Industry

Three decades ago, I visited the man who was about to publish my first book and he grumbled about the end of publishing "houses." He looked down the road and saw small houses folding and he thought the big houses were not far behind. To stay alive, he had sold his own house to Delacorte Press and he thought the whole industry was a house of cards.

I had just come from a local Borders, on Fifth Avenue, and I reported the aisles were crowded with shoppers and there were lines at the cash registers. This news seemed to cheer him, and I wondered why he hadn't ventured out into Manhattan and done a little market research of his own--but that was only one of many questions into a complexity.

The editor who chose my book out of the slush pile of submitted manuscripts told me not to get too excited, as every author does at the prospect of seeing his book come to print. "It will be a horrible experience," he warned. But I didn't pay him much mind--I had got to know him as a glass half empty type.

He proved to be prescient, of course. The publisher insisted on a bodice ripper cover for my black little tale and the book went nowhere, although a lucky book club deal made me enough money to buy my first house, so I could not get much sympathy.

I did get to see a different world, and that was worthwhile. I got to wander through the Convention Center in downtown Washington, DC where the publisher had my book in it's area for the American Booksellers Association convention. And that was, to put it mildly, a shock. It was like that scene in Gone With The Wind, where Scarlett O'Hara, always self absorbed, goes to the Atlanta railroad yard to find the doctor to rescue Melanie Wilkes, who is in desperate labor trying to deliver a baby at home. As Scarlett picks her way among the Civil War casualties the camera moves back and you gradually see the full scope of her dilemma--the yard is enormous, at least 10 football fields, and filled, shoulder to shoulder with the wounded and dying, and when Scarlett finally locates the doctor and tries to pull him away to come help deliver Melanie, he waves at all those around him and says, "Do you really think I can take time to help one woman, when I have all these to care for?"

And that was the booksellers' convention--fifty thousand books competing with mine for an audience, so many voices and why should any one take the time to notice mine?

That's when I realized the role of the publisher, which until then, for me, had been to select the meritorious work from all the eager but inept efforts of would be writers, the role was actually not simply the selection, but the advocacy for the book. In fact, the publisher might select A Farewell to Arms from all the tripe, but if the book was not put in the spotlight, nobody would ever know about this wonderful book, with its spectacular, unforgettable opening paragraph.

From my worm's eye view, I saw a multitude of people working in the publishing industry, from publicists to editors to CEO's to agents who were remarkable for their ineptitude. I found myself thinking, how did these people ever get a job? What industry has this concentration of--I cannot think of a better word--losers?

In my day job, I dealt with a lot of obnoxious, often misguided people, but each was, in his own way, good at what he (or she) did. They had been selected, trained and put to work and their work was evaluated, analyzed and reviewed frequently.

But publishing was the refuge of the feckless.

Eventually, I stopped writing books. I did this for many reasons: After my fifth book failed to hit the best seller lists, I was a toxic property, an author who was a proven failure. That failure belongs to the author, not the publicist, the cover art, the marketing campaign or the lack of it. I could have tried under a nom de plume, but by then I had much more exciting and interesting distractions--two young sons who I had to ignore, if I was going to write, even if I wrote after they went to bed. And I spoke with a number of book authors who had stopped writing for books, saying they wanted to write for an audience of more than 3000 (the typical sale of a typical book) and they were writing for magazines.

I wrote for magazines and discovered they were correct. My first piece, in The Washingtonian, resulted in more phone calls, letters, people stopping me in the hallway, than all of the novels I had published combined.

So, I cannot mourn the loss of Borders, Crown Books, etc nor of MacMillian, Random House, Farrar Strauss.

There will always be far more writing than reading, far more voices than ears willing to listen.

And I can read the font on my ebooks without my glasses.