Dec 30, 2009
Not for Naught
By: readinglocalseattle Categories: Essays Feature
{ Old paperbacks make for a good holiday-time fire. }
By Doug Nufer
I used to despise going through book stores during the holiday season. Holidays marked time: year after year, to shop at those stores was to expose myself to all of the books that had been published instead of mine. And yet, I had no choice. I had to keep on writing. It made me think of Humphrey Bogart in African Queen, getting back into the leech-infested waters to drag his boat through the weeds.
At the beginning of the millennium much has changed, for better and for worse. Book stores are closing, and a hog’s share of those left are chains that focus on bestsellers. Most of the few independents would rather deal with conglomerates than with independent presses. Small publishers that pay next to nothing demand a writer submit through an agent, even though no agent can afford to peddle manuscripts to publishers that pay next to nothing. For micro presses, literary contests , narrow submission/reading periods, and the pocket veto rejection have become standard. To submit, a writer must either enter a contest for a fee or wait for the month of the year when the press is considering new work. Many submissions are permitted on-line, which makes it easier to submit and to be rejected. The rejection slip has gone from being an all-too-common courtesy to a quaint relic, with “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” replacing the litany of euphemisms for, “Hit the road, Jack,” but even winners face a losing proposition: after many months or years, the book comes out, only to be widely ignored. At least now, I can feel fortunate to have been published at all.
The question “why bother?” hangs over a provisionally more interesting one: How does a writer move forward? The game may seem more challenging than ever, but this is no time to quit. Don’t think of Lost Illusions, but of lost delusions, of liberation from a business model in ruins. If you’re a writer of anything that is art and therefore not apt to be commercial, or any kind of poet, you had no business with the old model, anyway. The agent, the two-book contract, the mid-four to low-five figure advance that hasn’t changed in fifty years; the megastores with their price wars, the book club selections; the book tour Q & A inquisitions of NPR darlings; the last-ditch daily papers that still vie for industrial strength advertising and so must review only the same ten authors over and over and over again? Wasn’t it pretty to think so? At least you don’t have to fret over your stake in the Kindling fires to come.
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I went to Elliott Bay Books for a book they had to have: the last Bolaño interviews. Although the publisher Melville House, via its Moby Lives blog, has thoroughly presented the book, I wanted to get a hold of the thing before buying it. I also wanted to go there before the store’s rising costs and falling sales forced it to close or (as was recently announced) move; and, ever mindful of my own vulnerable rank in the literary food chain, I was hunting for publishers.
Now, a word on my sponsors. As if to live up to the code of my novel Never Again, where no word appears more than once, I have a pattern of not appearing with the same publisher more than once. My route of Black Square, Autonomedia, Chiasmus, soultheft, Make Now, and Les Figues defies the Maxwell Perkins/ Scribner’s/ Thomas Wolfe mid-20th century ideal of editor/ publisher/ authorial relationship, and defines what now has become typical (for various reasons, most of which have to do with money). Bottom line, writers should always check to see what presses are available, and how to connect with them. Part of this, however, has nothing to do with money: as Bolaño might have put it, the part about the writer getting paid. You want a publisher to finance the printing of a well made book, to offer some promotion, and to have good distribution, but even if a couple thousand copies sell (a bonanza at most levels of publishing), a writer does well to break even.
Rather than waste time prospecting for publishers whose books were in the stacks at Elliott Bay, I headed straight for the shill shelves, the section with books telling writers how to conduct the business side of writing- how to get an agent, where to find the right editor, how to behave when you do get a publisher (because getting a publisher is guaranteed as long as you buy the books telling you what to do, and then do everything they say, and so forth). I had been through these shills before, and I had even dealt with most of the presses that would have anything to do with me; but things are always changing, so I checked some all-purpose listings (like the old Thunder’s Mouth small press compendium or the eternal LMP rather than Jeff Herman’s latest Guide to Agents and Publishers or anything from Writers Market).
While browsing, I got sidetracked by one of those worthless advice manuals that nevertheless gives a valuable view of what you’re up against if you still indulge in dreams of mid-list glory, an advisory whose advice can be summarized as, “Don’t even think about writing a novel for publication that isn’t a realistic story with memorable characters and a driving plot.”
So, suppose you spent the next several months and years assembling a perfectly saleable virtual memoir of a novel that ran the gauntlet of accountants and marketing specialists and the leaky pipeline of Chapter Eleven ventures in publishing and distribution so that, at last, the finished product glided into the pre-remaindered limelight of a commercial release. Then what? Well, then as ever before, you would have to write something else, and climb back into the leech-infested waters, and drag your boat through the weeds.
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Doug Nufer is a specialist in literary constraints, a technique that applies certain conditions to, or establishes a certain pattern within writing. Mr. Nufer is the author of Negativeland (Autonomedia), Never Again (Four Walls Eight Windows/ Black Square), and On the Roast (Chiasmus), all of which came out in 2004, and of The Mudflat Man/ The River Boys (soultheft records, 2006). His stories and poems have appeared in many literary magazines and literary journals.
