Climbing the Mountain

Q: What change in the publishing landscape over the past decade and a half has impacted you the most?

- from Susan

My first novel, MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT, was published in 2010, almost two years after I got an agent and 20 months after she sold it in a two-book deal. So, I don’t have the longer history that would speak to the question from experience. It’s been crazy from my Day One. What I’ve experienced:

Small imprints or publishers may surprise you with a “by the way” email that says they’ve sold their entire catalog (including your book) to another publisher with no input from you. Oh, and they get whatever financial payment is in the deal, nadato you. Oh, and furthermore, that second book you were under contract to produce and were just about to send in? The new publisher may say “No thanks, we’re not honoring your contract with them.”

The above has an addendum: We are holding you to the terms of the contract that says if your book is available anywhere in any form, it’s still “in print” and you can’t get the rights back. Note that “any form” means an e-book, not just paper, and e-books can live online forever.

But wait! You can in some cases get the rights back, and I have been fortunate to land more than once during one of these handoffs with publishing companies or imprints that have been gracious. I’ve had the good fortune of playing it forward a couple of times, having a new publisher take me on because I could give them the rights for the previous books. In fact, I just got the rights back from the last publisher of the Dani series by asking for them – at no cost to me – when the publisher did the above transfer of its catalog.

…which leads me to another wrinkle in the new world of publishing. Now what? Do I want to self-publish? Go with another small outfit if they’ll have me? It’s a lot of work to self-publish successfully and to gain attention for my books among the hundreds of thousands of similarly available electronic and POD (print on demand) offerings that cover Amazon like falling snow.

So, the consolidation and fracturing of traditional publishers, the outdated contracts that freeze our book assets, the flowering of self-published books, and more are the changes that have been happening and that I’ve been feeling. But there’s another: the demise of traditional editor-led acquisitions at the big houses that are now dominated by sales, marketing and accounting decision makers. In the halcyon days before my time, so I’ve heard, an editor could find and champion an author, help her build a career, stay with her as her audience and “voice” matured. No longer. You have to arrive, usually via an agent, fully formed, replete with a social media platform, and your own commitment to marketing. And if you don’t become a bestseller immediately – and stay a bestseller book after book – you get dropped because you didn’t feed that bottom line well enough.

I hope I don’t sound bitter because I’m not. We’re all in the same boat, good writers and bad, competing for whatever kind of success and professional satisfaction we can find in a landscape that changes seemingly every day. We do what we can, we share strategies, we flock to the newest grand idea and when we’ve drowned it with our enthusiasm, we surf to the next one. 

It’s a rocky, vertiginous, dry-as-a-desert landscape at times. But writers will write, continue to search for audiences, and figure out how to make it work for themselves.