A Game of Snakes and Ladders

my life in and out of publishing...

Chapter 11. In which I pause to take stock and wish you all a merry, merry time…

It’s Christmas – and holidays, generally – so I’m taking a moment to think about the effects on writers of the changes in publishing I’ve noticed over a lifetime.

We’re notably jittery and often complaining about our relationships with publishers, either courting them furiously or preparing to be dumped. It’s a lot like having an unsatisfactory love affair with an unfaithful lover. I do think we need to give up this potentially toxic attitude, but it’s hard to do.  The economic facts behind it are that small and even bigger traditional publishers are stingy with advances these days, small publishers often do not offer an advance at all, and if you don’t earn out any advance you get, you will be dumped.  What are writers supposed to live off?  Not our work, almost certainly.

Back in the day, it was more like a marriage. You could at least count on a few good years, maybe more. You did not have to worry whether they would take your next book. And, the bottom line did not count for so much. It was a gentler profession; younger, experimental and purely literary writers could be coddled along, while the publishing houses made their money on the literary giants and best-sellers.

    Agents were more likely to be faithful than publishers, and still are.  They do have to sell our books, of course, to survive. But generally speaking, they are nicer about it, and more forgiving of the inevitable duds we sometimes send them.

I knew I wanted my present agent to represent me when I first heard her at a conference state from the platform “We need you more than you need us.”  Really?  I rushed to talk to her afterwards, and we have been together ever since.

Many people are now going it alone, self-publishing or paying ‘hybrids’ to do it for them. A friend who self-publishes revels in her freedom to write what she likes. But there’s the work – do you want to be a publisher as well as an author, are you up for what amounts to a second career?

    Then there’s AI – the bad fairy at the christening, just come along to pretend to be nice, but steal what you have and use it for its own devices.

So, what are my suggestions for the coming year?  Dear fellow writers: stick to your guns, hang tough (all this cowboy stuff!) and hold on to your agents for dear life.  Above all, don’t think that your agent or publisher doesn’t love you – she may not – but someone who believes in your work is worth their weight in gold. And we ourselves have to believe in the work, and just do it, because what we do in a day is, as Annie Dillard once said, what we are doing with our life.  We are creating it, sentence by sentence - the writing life.

Thanks for reading!