Some years ago, when I was an eager young novelist with a manuscript fresh from my tiny but hard-working laser printer, I followed the advice of anyone who knew anything about the business of selling novels and attended many more writers’ conferences and events than I do now.
It was not a bad tale; a darkly comic thriller about a troubled teenaged boy in quest of his biological father. A little intrigue, a little kidnapping, a little pyromania. A little rough around the edges, a lot embarrassing when I go back and read chunks of it now, but way back when it made some people laugh. And I wasn’t even paying them. I honed it with the help of my writing group, headed by a published author and professional writing teacher, I polished it thanks to the thorough reading by an on-line acquaintance (whose risotto recipe kicks butt, by the way). I thought I was ready for the big time and kept poking away at my list of intended agents despite rejection after rejection.
The worst rejections were the ones that I got in person. Mostly at writers’ conferences, when I’d present my carefully-honed sentence that’s supposed to represent the entire novel (and I don’t write short or simple novels) and be met with the typical sequence of events: 1. The blank stare; 2. The beat of silence; 3. Something like, “that’s not my thing,” or “I can’t sell that,” or “it doesn’t grab me around the throat” (this from an agent I really wanted to grab around the throat).
The face-to-face slam that stuck with me the longest was my first, at a writers’ conference in Westchester (the one I often refer to as “the day I met Ben Cheever,” rather than “the day I got cut off at the knees). Most of the day was fun – going from workshop to workshop, meeting and commiserating with other writers, and although in Ben Cheever’s keynote he was a bit pessimistic about the market (at that time in his career, even being John Cheever’s son didn’t guarantee him a pass to publishing), he was an entertaining speaker and not a schmuck when you talked to him in person. The real fun came later. On the schedule was a workshop class where you could pitch your novel to a real live agent! (I’d never seen one before, but had seen a lot of their work – mostly preprinted postcards and letters indicating that I should have taken my mother’s advice and gone into advertising, or that for a first time novelist, my work was remarkably free from typographical errors.)
When it was finally my turn to see the Great and Powerful Oz, I steadied my knees, willed my palms to stop sweating and talked to her. I didn’t even get the pitch out before she stopped me and asked about the history of the work. I guess that if you’ve already been to a lot of publishers, it limits where they can go. No publishers, I said, but I did have a lot of rejections from agents.
“You might want to try a writer’s group,” she said.
While something inside me withered, I kept the smile on my face and gave her my pitch.
Instead of the blank stare, I got a frown. “Comedy doesn’t sell,” she said.
And then she moved on to somebody else. And left me standing there, blinking stupidly. Comedy doesn’t sell? Didn’t Dave Barry have a Pulitzer? Didn’t John Irving sell a lot of novels? Kurt Vonnegut? For Christ’s sake. Dissing not just a genre, but an entire category of entertainment?
I couldn’t believe it. I refused to believe it. And I kept on trying to sell the thing. I got a few more similar comments. Including one that completely baffled me. I’d sent the first three chapters to an agent, who actually took the time (or asked her assistant to take the time) to write back a hand-written rejection: “Your writing is really funny, but I can’t sell this.”
Huh? Didn’t I just sell her? Or was it the pyromaniac romance-novelist mother character that was giving her the problem?
I’ll never know.
Eventually I had enough of the rejections and stopped, too engrossed in my next book to keep bothering.
And life went on.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I signed on to an on-line outfit that paid for written content. Not much money, but some exposure, you could keep your rights or give them the exclusive, and they would consider any type of writing for publication. As long as it met their submission requirements.
So as a test, I sent them not my best stuff but a somewhat funny op-ed piece that I’d banged out a few months earlier.
And yesterday I got an answer.
“We have declined to pay for this piece; we don’t often pay for humor or op-ed pieces because they fail to generate enough traffic. But feel free to submit this for non-payment and we’ll post it right away.”
So the old thing about comedy not selling translates into the new media as well.
If I was feeling feistier or actually gave a damn about the twenty dollars or so they might have paid me if they felt the thing would generate enough traffic, I might research the number of hits Dave Barry’s blog gets or get some handle on the number of e-mail jokes that flutter around the web on any given day.
But it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
I’ll just keep my head down, and keep writing, and if people laugh, that’s a good thing. We could all use a good laugh, right?
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2 comments:
It's worse than you think.
Steve Stirling, a best selling SF/fantasy author who I have occasinally exhanged email with, and who has occasionally posted brief comments on my blog, once told me in an email that there are maybe half a dozen people who can say 'yes' or 'no' to publishing an SF/fantasy novel.
Half a dozen people.
They can, like the guy in THE PLAYER, only say 'yes' a limited number of times a year, depending on how much new material their house wants to put out that year. If you estimate that each of them can say 'yes' to new work 12 times a year, you're probably somewhere close.
So, that's 72 new slots for SF/fantasy novels a year.
Obviously, they are going to want to publish stuff they are reasonably sure will sell, so they are inclined to look at authors who have established track records. Think there are 72 SF/fantasy authors out there already with established track records trying to get one of those slots? Sure.
In fact, there aren't 72 slots, because I'm going to guess 2/3s of those 'new work' slots are already taken, by authors they already have under contract. Assume that, and the available slots drop to 18.
18. In the whole subgenre of SF/fantasy.
Think more than 18 non-contracted authors submit novels every year? Shit, I could submit 7 novels a year, if I wanted.
When an agent, or a publisher, or anyone else in the hierarchy, tells you "I can't sell this" or "this won't sell", what they are saying is, "this isn't worth my time, I need to get paid just like everyone else, the industry is so overcrowded these days I can only invest my time in sure things".
So "Humor doesn't sell" -- by Laurie B, because Laurie B is an unknown, and a publisher may not want to bother looking at it, so the agent doesn't want to waste her time trying.
Every SF or fantasy writer I am aware of who is currently selling stuff somehow got around the slush pile. They got in 'over the transom', which means, basically, they had an inside contact. Lois McMaster Bujold wrote an outstanding Star Trek novel that was way too good for that particular ghetto, so someone she knew on the inside advised her to rewrite it and remove all the Star Trek references, and then that person took it to someone at Baen Publishing and that rewritten Star Trek novel was published as SHARDS OF HONOR, and Lois McMaster Bujold is now a bestselling SF/fantasy author with 30 excellent novels to her name and she publishes a new one every year.
I would imagine that S.M. Stirling and Barbara Hambly and anyone else who's gotten into that field in the last ten or twenty years has a similar story. And I have to assume that while the fields you're trying to get into are larger and broader, still, it's the same thing. Everybody has a novel, everybody has a screenplay, everybody thinks they are certain to be the next Stephen King, or Dean R. Koontz, or John Cheever, or Quentin Tarantino, so everybody is flooding every available slushpile with their crap, and calling every agent, and sniffing around the edges looking for momentarily unlocked back doors or unbolted windows to slip in by.
You need someone on the inside, someone who has read your work and liked it and who can kick it up to that next level, someone who knows somebody who knows one of those half dozen people who can say 'yes' or 'no'.
Me, I don't know if I'm a really good writer, but I'm damn sure I'm better than Dean R. Koontz and I'm absolutely certain that if someone would publish my work, I could find a steady audience of 40 or 50 thousand people who would enjoy my books and buy them (maybe not in hardcover, but certainly in paperback) and most of my novels would make good movies, too.
But there are a million other people out there, at least, who think the same thing.
There are now companies out there who will (for a fee) help you get your manuscript in shape to submit to agents. Not to publishers. Agents.
That's how bad it is.
On one of my previous blogs, I detailed the last time I made a real solid attempt to get something published. I had six short stories I thought were publishable. I sent all of them out to three different SF magazines over the course of a month, alternative between titles when they each got rejected. They all got rejected, eventually, from all three magazines.
One magazine -- F&SF, I believe -- returned one of my stories ONE WEEK after I sent it.
I don't mean they mailed it back a week after I sent it. No. I mailed it in Tampa, it went to New Jersey, and it was back in my mailbox in Tampa SEVEN DAYS after I put it in the mailbox.
With a brief, hand typed, one sentence rejection letter indicating that the editor hadn't been "grabbed" by the story.
There is no way I believe that editor actually read that story. But with only maybe 6 slots per month open in his magazine, why should he bother? There are sixty or more established authors out there trying to get one of those slots every month. Why should he even bother to read something from someone he doesn't know?
This is how it is.
Mark Evanier likes to point out that although we know the game is rigged, we need to keep playing, because it's the only way you can win.
I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. But this is how it is.
I do know this much -- It doesn't mean you can't write. You CAN write; you're a damned good writer, probably better than I am.
For whatever that's worth.
H - thanks...I think.
I had someone on the inside...or so I thought. Rainelle Burton, who I knew from the Women's Writing Guild, had gotten an Oprah-club-like novel well published and really liked my writing. She asked me to send her a marketing package for her to forward to her agent and then I never heard from her, despite reminding her (nicely) several times.
I'm not completely daunted, just out of energy at the moment.
Just keep writing. One day, something will stick.
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