Because I just haven’t said enough stupid shit this week…

I figure, fuck, I’m on a roll, why stop now? So I want to talk about this constantly parroted comment about the publishing industry: “This isn’t an art, it’s a business.” This is their excuse for taking only “safe bets,” their excuse for taking on only the nice polite authors who write books by the numbers like a math formula. It’s their excuse for why we no longer have any risky books without the writers going indie and proving they can make sales before any publisher will touch them.

You’re a business huh? Well you’re a business with a 1% success rate. Let’s start right there. You call yourselves the kings of content control, but you can’t pick a sure winner. In fact, people have sent you award-winning books as a test of your quality controls, and you rejected best-selling, award-winning books. Any book you do sell a million copies of is due more to dumb luck than your discerning taste, and any book you sell that is popular is usually ridiculed as popular crap.

You’re a business who mocked authors for years, and who made them follow the most asinine rules to reach you. A full decade after email came out, most of the big publishers still wouldn’t get with the times. They’re finally catching up now, when the rest of the world is moving on from email to other forms of online communication. And now that we’re all using social media, what are y’all saying? “Don’t contact us on social media. That’s so gauche.” Hey, maybe in ten years, you’ll actually figure out what the social part of social media means. But judging from your history with email, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for you to get a clue.

You’re a business that mocked POD and ebooks, even as you were losing talent to the indie movement. You’re a business who mocked indie writers as desperate and unable to be patient and work through your “proven system”. (Bold words from people who lose money on most of their safe bets.) You’re a business who once you noticed the trend of readers moving to e-ink, raised the prices on ebooks to punish your customers for not shoring up your paper business. You’re a business who keeps killing your own international market with region restrictions and DRM. Despite your constant unprofessional behavior, you still demand that authors kiss your ass, and you still don’t listen to anything the readers have to say about how you run your business.

But perhaps the biggest sin you commit in parroting “This is a business, not an art,” is that you blatantly ignore that your job as a business is to sell art. If you book publishers worked in the music industry, you might try to convince punk and alternative metal bands to produce easy listening, because that has more of a mainstream appeal. You’re a tone-deaf business, one incapable of changing with the times, or of listening to the authors you work with, or the readers you work for. In short, you’re a business of people who suck at their jobs, and you still want to convince writers that they should jump through your flaming hoops when you haven’t demonstrated a lick of business sense in twenty fucking years.

So, yeah, forgive me for deciding to ignore your business and just focus on selling my art by myself. I may be less professional than you in my methods, but I’m relatively sure I can’t fail any more spectacularly than you have.