When Vin tried to leave a comment pursuant to my post about whether it’s okay to query more than one literary agent at a time, Blogger rejected it as too long. “AFTER I GET DONE, your robot tells me I've exceeded the 4,076 character limit,” he wrote in an email. “Is that 600 words? I write 1,200 words while I'm waiting for the teakettle toboil.”
To this introduction I add that Vin said what I wish I’d have been astute and brave enough to write.
The old model, pretty dysfunctional for half a century anyway, is collapsing before our eyes.
The unspoken assumptions are: 1) I need a big-time New York publisher because only that person/outfit has the money and expertise to publish my book in attractive, professional form, get it professionally reviewed and get it into bookstores. Therefore, 2) Because hardly any publishers will still look at an unsolicited manuscript, I need a New York literary agent to open the gates to one of those publishers.
But read the final page of Richard Russell's 2006 "Book collector's Price Guide." He reports the effect of the calcification of publishing into the hands of a few green-eyeshade houses is "to freeze the state of literature and writing in general, keeping it within the bounds of the type of writing that has a 'winning track record.'" As a result, "Books published in the last decade in the United States will, over time, become worthless and fit only for the dollar bins. ..."
He's right. The shelves and tables are now full of ill-written derivative potboilers, shoddily bound. Anything new and refreshing tends to come from "outside the system," often in small press runs, 500 copies run off as a lark by some science fiction club or a socialist bookstore in the Haight or the Minnesota chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars.
Agents are told to "Go find me someone who can write just like ..." James Patterson, John Grisham, Alice Walker, whoever. They don't expect to find these people in the slush pile. You'd be FAR more likely to attract an agent's attention if you said you could prove you'd had a homosexual affair with Mitt Romney, "but I can barely write a grocery list; can you find me a ghost writer?"
THAT they know how to pitch.
And they pretend to serve at the altar of "literature"?
I once had a New York agent (actually signed a contract, the works) who's since written a book about "how to write a best-seller." All he ever did was ask me with great urgency whether I could "crank out a fictionalized biography of David Bowie in six weeks." By the time I got him an outline, five weeks later, he'd moved on to some other scheme, based on a different lunch with some other impresario.
The "rule" against multiple inquiries is for the convenience of agents and publishers, who pretend they're still a gentleman's club editing Scott Fitzgerald with pencils and sleeve garters and rubber cement, and thus further pretend to be outraged over the implication that they should get in a quick bid for your services, rather than watching you grovel at their feet for a month or two before moving on to woo their equally unattainable cousin in the next block. They act as though they're Scarlett O'Hara and you've just announced you intend to propose to the 40 prettiest girls in town, announcing you'll marry the first one who says "Yes."
It's not a courtship; it's a business. (If it's a courtship, send flowers and ask if they prefer the missionary position.)
Why send out what amount to 40 form letters, a month apart over three years, when you can mail them all the same week?
Either way, 3 to 7 percent will reject you with a form letter, the rest will never reply at all. And I say this as someone who's made my living exclusively as a writer for 40 years, all of my books printed at professional binderies, all produced with private investment capital, with not a penny of the proceeds owed to any German banker pretending to be a publisher nor to any Sarah Lawrence graduate pretending to be a "literary agent."
The Internet is destroying their distribution monopoly; the rest of their haughty house of cards will collapse soon.
The expensive collectibles of tomorrow, Mr. Russell concludes, will be unusual, innovative books "subsidy published" in small press runs today ... the same way Poe subsidized the first printing of "Tamerlaine," the same way John Grisham subsidized the first publication of "A Time to Kill" by Wynwood Press in 1989.(Current value of a nice single copy: $4,000.)
And today's academics and "publishing professionals," far from being on the lookout for the new and the good, will reject it out of hand, Russell concludes, realizing that "a 'new' novel makes their years of knowledge, study and expertise obsolete."
-- V.S.
