What Don't I Have to Sell?

From my teens, when I first started to contemplate being a professional fiction writer, through my forties, when ebooks arrived in theory but still weren't mainstream, the model for a literary career was fixed. The writer wrote. If the writer wrote well enough, major publishers would license rights to the writer's creations and do the work (much of it invisible to the writer) to get the novels and stories into the hands of paying readers.

And there are still some writers for whom this model still works. But such writers are a smaller and smaller portion of the profession. For the most part, these are the writers who have become such cultural icons that their names are widely known. These few best-selling writers sell in such numbers that even though pirates re-sell or give away their books prodigiously, the number of sales are so vast that the writers can easily keep writing.

For most of us, though, best-sellerdom is not in the cards. At one time, a model that was open to us was the mid-list career. We could write books that sold reasonably well to a smaller audience. Most successful writers fit into this category, never breaking into the best-seller lists, but selling enough copies to make a living. As a writer mostly of short stories, I could survive on a parallel path by selling individual stories to mid-list anthologies or to magazines and occasionally licensing the rights to a collection.

Publishing started changing in the 1980s, and a big part of the change was a new attitude about mid-list writers. Publishing houses that had been small, independent businesses, often family owned, were increasingly bought out by corporations. As family-owned businesses, or the legacy of family-owned businesses, publishing houses brought modest profits and significant social prestige to their owners. The new corporate owners focused more intently on the bottom line.

The corporations noticed (quite reasonably), that it cost as much to edit, and publish a mid-list book as a best-seller. It made perfect sense to try to publish fewer mid-list books and more best-sellers. The mid-list was increasingly viewed as strictly a training ground for new writers who were best-sellers-in-waiting. Publishers knew that it was unreasonable to think that a writer's first book would be a best-seller. There was bound to be a learning curve, and it might take a couple books to build an audience. But publishers made it harder and harder for a writer to have a mid-list career. The mid-list was where a writer might work for the first two or three titles on the way to the Big Book. And if the best-seller didn't come? Then that writer had a track record as "not a best-seller," which meant that the big publishers would rather try some other fresh face who might be the next John Grisham rather than publish another title from a writer who definitely wasn't selling like Grisham.

The upshot was that friends of mine who were regularly selling ten thousand copies of their novels were not offered contracts for their fifth or sixth books. Ten thousand readers might adore these books, but that was not enough of an audience for the big publishers to bother with.

If anything, that desire to concentrate on only the biggest of Big Name Authors is now increasing as ebooks put downward pressure on book prices. The big publishers need big profits, ideally concentrated in fewer titles produced with less in-house labor.

So my list of things that I have to sell, and to whom, starts with a negative. I do not have properties that I can sell to a big publisher. I look at my work, at the popular tastes and publishing preferences that make up best-sellerdom, and I don't see a plausible match, especially since my favorite form is the short-short story. Traditional publishing isn't for me.

Tomorrow: Classes of Property