I know a lot of writers. I guess the current existential crisis bubbling up in the world of publishing was likely to turn up some very different takes among them, but last week must have seen something stirring in the authorial zeitgeist—two writers I know posted about the state of publishing, and each served as an emissary from a very different end of the chart.
First, Ron Egatz weighed in at his blog, The Egatz Epitaph. Egatz is the author of a book of poems, and runs independent publisher Camber Press. In a posting aimed primarily at discussing the state of e-readers, he delivered this: “…people are fighting for a front row seat in the publishing industry. Everyone smells the opportunity to reach a wider and enthused reading audience at a cost lower than ever. The technology and rapid delivery of eBooks makes for a feast of both new readers, i.e., paying customers, and neglected authors who can be in or back in the hands of those readers.”
He goes on to discuss how new technology is affecting the directions in which narrative is heading—toward the non-linear, he says, courtesy of apps and e-readers and the possibilities for embedding other kinds of content.
Egatz, whose book came out this year, seems relatively undaunted, even excited, by the task writers now face: adapting to an entirely different, rapidly changing system of delivery. Writers, in short, are in the middle of trying to write something other than the traditional notion of “book.”
On the other end of the scale, former Valley resident Pete Nelson pointed to a Wall Street Journal article that’s enough to seize the gears of many a writer: “Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America’s top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.”
Nelson knows the world of publishing well, and from the points of view of author and industry insider: he’s married to a literary agent, and is the author of 19 books of fiction, six books of non-fiction, and countless articles. His first works came out in the 1980s, and his 2010 novel, I Thought You Were Dead, takes place in Northampton.
Though he found the article depressing, he’s learned to adapt to an industry long declared beyond rescuscitation. “I’m sort of pessimistic about pessimism,” he told me. “It’s like asking a farmer about the weather—it’s always bad. It’s depressing. The state of publishing has been bad since I started.”
For an author like Nelson, getting what he’s already written in front of new readers is the main challenge, and it’s there that he sees the most difficulty, thanks to the accessibility of online publishing. It used to be that “vanity presses”—publishers who print books at the author’s cost for those who can’t land a traditional publisher—got roundly ignored in almost every circle of the literary world. Online, the boundaries aren’t so clear any more.
“It’s so hard to rise above the babble,” Nelson says. “It used to be that the publishers were the gatekeepers—they would publish what they think of as good. Now the self-published are right there next to people who’ve spent their whole lives working on their craft.”
For aspiring authors, it might sound good to have material so visible, until you consider the reams of submissions agents and publishers already wade through. Nelson says few are likely to have time or interest to search for the overlooked needle in an online haystack.
That’s bad news in many ways. As the Journal and Nelson both point out, writers with ready-built platforms are likely to become more entrenched; authors of bestsellers are likely to keep getting richer while new and unknown authors go begging.
Perhaps the worst news from the Journal was the change in advances new authors are likely to land. Small publishers, they say, pay $1,000 to $5,000, where major publishers are likely to offer $50,000 to $100,000. Fewer writers are likely to be able to make a living from their writing, and getting noticed is likely to become ever more difficult.
Mix that with the question of where books are going in a climate of declining readership in general and the brave new world of e-books, and it’s probably only safe to say that uncertainty reins. There are constants—people love stories, no matter the delivery system. All the same, Nelson says, he’s curious about what he’s going to do in a couple of years, after he delivers on his current book contract.
He sounds worried, but he comes back to where he began, putting the fine point on the state of the publishing industry he’s been part of for two decades-plus: “It’s always terrible, and it always survives.”