Every lunch date with an editor begins the same way: How bad is it? Is it going to get better? Will books still be around in our lifetime?
Last week, one editor sat down and exclaimed that she was tired of all the gloom and doom. She was going to put blinders on and get on with her work. Wake me up when it’s over.
A young editor wondered if he got in the business too late; he was worried if editors would exist in twenty, ten, five years.
Today, at a breakfast, an editor said said that sales were hideous. Books were getting out of the gate, but then mysteriously falling off a cliff a few weeks later, disappearing.
I think it’s going to take more than Jeff Bezos and Sergey Brin to put an end to print books. Still, this is a time of transition and as such it is terrifying and exciting. How as a writer do you keep your own counsel, find your way, stay warm?
Filed under: Authors, Books, Publishing, The End of the World as We Know It |
Betsy Lerner 
I do it by reading this, and other agent’s blogs.
Knowing there are people out there in the publishing world who love books, and love their jobs, is what keeps me from giving up.
It’s comforting for me to know that even if no one is sure what the future holds, there kind of a sense that we’re all in it together.
“Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question ”
last section of INTRODUCTION from New Poems (1938) by E. E. Cummings
published when he was 44 years old
Uh, yeah. That too.
(sometimes I feel so pedestrian…)
I laugh. This blog helps me do it.
And then I hop on my toboggan and get to trekking.
Because every day books are sold to publishers and in book stores. Fewer perhaps, but still many.
I am determined to be one of the few.
People who love books are addicted to good books and good stories. They’ll always be consuming stories, no matter what form they’re delivered in.
Blind optimism.
People are still reading, people are still buying books. I HAVE to believe that. My debut novel comes out in January, it sold a year ago right at the beginning of publishing’s supposed demise…. something has to rise out of the ashes… it may as well be my book. (Repeat after me, pretty please).
Just like everything else, the economy, my bank account, war….I grumble for a couple days, revise the damn novel because I LOVE IT, and then on the side I start a new one. This time I’ve decided to try my hand at young adult. So I go to the bookstore, read a bunch of YA books, reread Donald Maass and Betsy Lerner, and that one for dummies, and set a goal of finishing a rought draft by January, because I’ve heard that nothing much takes place in publishing during the holidays anyway; why get frustrated even more. Then it will be 2010 and I’ll just see how far I’ve come.
Oh, and then I go to bed reading Borges and imagining great libraries all over the universe.
I’ve thought that, too: that I’m in the book biz at exactly the wrong time. But then I remember that no matter what — even if I’d got my BS and sat tight at AIG, or if I’d learned to play the piccolo and joined the Army Band and coasted 20 years until retirement, or if I had gone through with my second engagement and married for money (that is, done something remunerative AND socially acceptable) — in 100 years I’ll still be dead. In view of that inevitable outcome, I might as well ditch the drama of second-guessing myself and the state of the world (which has ALWAYS been a mess) and spend my life doing something that I’m halfway good at and that amuses me, no matter how irrelevant. So I spend my days voting for Democrats and writing book[s].
Thinking about death and whittling away at my definition of “success” is what keeps me writing. On days when I’m not too hung over.
I keep warm with my lap blanket, a cup of coffee and the following: throughout the ages forecasters have predicted doom (occasionally are they right), publishing has always been hard, writing is also hard but fun and satisfying. The human race craves stories.
Finally, I can’t recall the attribution, but I read that ~90% of new businesses fail, yet business schools are full of optimism.
No doubt the cuneiformists had a coniptionfit when Guttenburg rolled out his press. This too shall pass.
I read. I buy books. Constantly. All my friends and all my family read. Constantly. They all buy books. Can we really be that much in the minority? That’s my soothing mantra.
I am an eternal optimist, except on my bad days.
With humor and self-confidence. Occasionally, those are forced to take liquid form.
I’m actually excited by the possibilities. I don’t necessarily adore “books” but reading and stories. My career has been in web development since before Microsoft released Internet Explorer. I get nostalgic for old computers, but not so much for paper-based books. I see a door closing and lots and lots of windows opening. Many traditional industry jobs may be displaced or changed, but in the end, I think new jobs will emerge and good homes will be found for books that were hard to market in the last decade. As a digital book consumer, I am thrilled at the ease of download, the portability, and the ability to read a chapter at my leisure before committing to the entire book.
And I look forward to the “Pandora Radio” for books!
As a writer, I just assume the same old advice still applies: don’t give up your day job.
I’ve been reading and enjoying your posts for six months. I do not envy agents. You must pay close attention to the industry.
I can depend on my agent to worry about the business side while I turn off the noise and focus on writing my best stories. I remind myself that life is the subject of my stories. My stories are not the subject of my life.
And I remind myself to be grateful that my family has a home and to try to help someone who has less. That keeps me warm.
Thank you again, Betsy, for investing time in this blog.
I keep writing, everyday; and remember that I don’t do this for the money yet.
Then I drink.
I hate the motherfuckers.
My first novel just went out on submission yesterday! There are no guarantees. Did a quit my day job? Yes! I did that two years ago so I could write. I am focusing on what I perceive to have control over–the writing.
I just keep writing. I hate worrying over something I can’t really control in any way—so, ‘keep writing’ is all I can do, and I’ll worry about its format and its profits or its doom when each is finished.
I never thought publishing had much to do with the art of writing. It’s a good thing, because I’d never write if it was only with the goal of publication as motivation.
I just keep writing. And I check in with twenty-somethings here and there quite a bit, as well as late teens types like my younger daughter. There are a lot of readers. Book readers. I don’t know what the hell is going on, really, with all this.
I do know that I have two guys in their twenties in my office on a reading list (they asked me to tell them what to read – t hey’re MBA guys, and they love what I’ve given them, and have asked ‘what next’? (I’m Southern, so I started them out with All the King’s Men – then we talked about my idea of the perfect Southern Novel – which they’d have no idea about as they are from Michigan and Pennsylvania, and i told them The Moviegoer, but to read Camus’s The Stranger first, and then we’d talk about exitentialism in literarature.
My point is, I think people do read and do want to read, but they want to read what’s worth their time to read – what resonates. And I’m doing my absolute damnedest to do my part to keep excellent novels in the hands of those who will go on to read more.
As a writer, I definitely want an audience when my turn arrives. that, and there’s no better food for the long-term sustenance of the soul than fiction that takes you out somewhere and brings you back again, changed.
P.S. Sorry about the typos. Just saw them.
The book has a special place in our culture. The electronic offerings are merely derivatives of the same. The big dream of a big deal has slowly faded with maturity and all the bad news has failed to dissuade me from a general passion for reading and making literature. We are legion. There is an economic crisis going on. That affects NEW books, but old books can be revisited and re-read for free in one’s own library. The industry measures books sold, not books read, and so there is a bit of disconnect between passion for literature and markets in times like these.
Don’t worry (or worry!) Wall Street will cook up another series of b.s. products and a bubble will balloon and people will blow money they don’t have once more. Some of that will be on books.
It’s the American way.