The Writer’s Predicament
You know what the biggest predicament is if you’re a serious writer, one who has devoted yourself to the craft, who has published books and wants to continue doing so?
How do you sell the damned things?
Because if you don’t sell them, you don’t get any money. And if you don’t get any money, your wife and children look at you and say, “What the heck are you doing? I see you sitting down there in your cave writing and I see the finished product and I see the covers and I see them on Amazon, but why aren’t they selling? Why isn’t there money in the account to feed everybody and cover all the bills and take me on that nice vacation and buy me that cute little sportscar I’d love to have? You’re supposed to be the breadwinner, right? That’s what you said when you blew off practicing law and told us all you were going to take care of us by writing books. That’s what you said!”
Here’s how I think it was done a very short time ago, and how I think it’s still done on a lesser scale because newspapers are strangling. A publisher (and I’m not talking about a publishing company, I’m talking about the man or woman who runs the company) says, “Okay, I need a legal thriller guy. I need somebody who can compete with that damned Grisham fellow.” He has submissions, of course, that have come in through agents and writers, probably hundreds of them. He has people, underlings, associate publishers and executive editors and editors who are all trying to convince him that their guy is the guy. So they go to their meetings and they fight their little inter-office battles and eventually, they choose the guy. Or the girl. But mostly, in that genre, they choose the guy. I had a conversation with a former bestselling legal thriller writer a little over a year ago. He was highly successful as a writer for awhile. He still does pretty good. But he told me that whoever the BIG CHEESE at his particular publishing firm was chose him, and once they chose him, they dedicated their payola money to him.
He didn’t specifically call it “payola” money, but he explained how things worked, and there’s really no other name you can give it. All those snooty reviewers that all seem to agree that a particular book from a particular writer is good? And not just good, it’s a must-read, a life-changer, a LITERARY contribution to the genre fiction. The Boston Globe reviewer and the New York Times reviewer and the L.A. Times reviewer and the Chicago Tribune reviewer and the reviewers from Denver and Portland and Baltimore and Philadelphia and Miami and Phoenix and Dallas, even the pisant New Orleans Picayune, they all receive advance copies of the new guy’s books and they all LOVE it? These are people who masturbate to the thought of tearing a writer apart. These are literary gas bags, as Stephen King refers to them, who like nothing better than to rip apart the work of an author who, unlike them, actually has the brains, the balls, and the persistence write a novel.
“A literary force in crime fiction,” they say. “He’s changing the genre,” they say. They use words like intelligent and ethereal and exciting and the old “couldn’t put it down” cliche. A “roller-coaster ride that will keep you glued to your seat and keep you up far beyond your bedtime.” They all say the same thing about the same books. They fall all over themselves trying to outdo each other in their praise, their insight, their connection to the book. And in doing so, they’re goal is one thing: to get you to read it.
Why?
Because they got paid.
Before you know it, everybody in the country thinks they need to read the book, because if they don’t, well, they’ll be out of the loop. Their friends at work will look at them over the water cooler and say, “What? You haven’t read ‘Into the Heat of the Nightstalker?’ What cave are you living in? Are you anti-literary, are you anti-intellectual, are you anti-social? C’mon, man! Are you just uncool?”
It’s pretty sick when you think about it. All these gas bag reviewers who wrote their glowing reviews got paid by the publisher. They got paid by their newspapers, of course, but they also got paid by the publishers to write favorable reviews. It’s the old model when the record companies were paying disc jockeys and radio stations to play records over and over and over. They called it payola, and you know what? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Once the reviewers have been greased, then the retailers have to be greased, whether it be Barnes and Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million, whatever big book retailing company happens to be in the business of selling retail books at the time. The publishers grease them to put the books out front, in prominent displays. They charge ridiculous prices for hard cover books because they’ve had to pay out so much bribe money to get the reading public to believe if they don’t read the book they’ll become a social pariah, or worse, a plain old dumbass. And let’s not forget the printing companies who actually produce the product. They get paid bupkus. Then there are the distributors, the middle men who haul the books from the print warehouses to the retail stores. They need their share, too.
I guess that’s why the old, traditional, Big 6 New York publishers pay their authors slave wages. That’s why the best deal an author can get on a hardcover book is around 15-17 percent. That’s why the paperback royalties paid to authors are between six and eight percent. They spend so much money bribing people, they don’t have anything left for the authors. Their executives and stockholders do very well, thank you very much. These big companies that are being sued by the Department of Justice right now for collusion? They’re multi-billion dollar corporations, every one of them. And they’ve become multi-billion dollar corporations by bribing their way into bookstores and then screwing both their customers and their writers.
To hell with those people. You and I and Amazon are gonna get along without them.
