Editing/Publishing is a Tough Business

Here’s a nice post from Bryan Furuness, who apparently ended his Facebook fast in order to share this with all of you. Isn’t he generous?

Lots of quote-worthy lines in Bryan’s post, but I’ll excerpt the middle of it below to entice you to read it. Pressgang’s first single-author title (after an anthology) is out now, for a total of two books in the three years since Bryan first asked Victoria Barrett for advice about starting a press. She’d been doing Engine Books for about six months at that point, plus a year of planning before the official launch of EB.

I started Lacewing Books, the YA imprint at Engine Books, in the summer of 2012, and I can relate to a lot of what Bryan says. The first two Lacewing titles will be released in the next four months, with a third coming out in March. (Lacewing will only publish two titles a year for the time being.)

Here’s part of what Bryan had to say after receiving 378 contest entries for the Pressgang prize: 

I’m going to be turning down a lot of worthy work, saying no to a long line of deserving writers.

This is hard. It doesn’t stop being hard.

Harder than I expected it to be when I started Pressgang a couple of years ago. By that point I’d been an editor of lit mags for several years. I wasn’t exactly callous about rejecting stories, but I accepted it as part of the business.
It’s different with books.

With a story, you’re talking about something that has taken the writer weeks or months. Not a small amount of time, but not her life’s work, either. Plus, the writer probably has more stories lying around. The writer has diversified. With a book, you’re talking about years. Decades, sometimes. One basket, so many eggs.

I don’t send rejections lightly, is what I’m saying. I feel every one.

The older I get, the tougher my skin and the softer my heart. Taking rejection for my own work doesn’t sting like it used to, but every year it’s harder to send them out.

If I ever quit this business, it will be because I can’t send out one more rejection. Empathy is degenerative.

Very true. And yet, I feel better after reading Bryan’s words, in part because my editorial experiences are somewhat similar.

As an editor at Freight Stories, an online fiction journal, I’ve had to reject plenty of story submissions by some of the best writers in the country—authors who maybe didn’t send their best work, or who sent a novel excerpt that just didn’t make a whole lot of sense on its own, or who, in a few cases, expected us to say “yes” solely because of the writer’s reputation. I could list just 20 of the known and respected authors we’ve rejected in alphabetical order and tell you that it’s the list of authors included in the next Best American Short Stories and you wouldn’t be blamed for believing me.

And Freight Stories—which will see its ninth issue published online later this year, and a tenth and final issue in print after that—is an online journal that doesn’t pay. Why, then, have we received so many submissions from excellent authors, including the many we’ve accepted?

My guess is that these writers want editors. Writers need editors. Sure, writers also want their books (and stories) to be published, but a publishing a book without a good editor involved doesn’t feel right. That’s a lesson I’ve learned as a writer, but also something I’ve observed from the editor’s desk, and from speaking with dozens of authors I respect.

I haven’t had to say “no” nearly as often in my work at Lacewing and Engine Books, because it’s still Victoria’s company, first and always, though I’ve had to decline a number of story collections for various reasons, including manuscripts I knew would easily find a home elsewhere. Lacewing hasn’t started accepting submissions—though we will soon—but even still, a few writers I know have asked me to consider their YA manuscripts, or their friend’s manuscript. I’ve mostly had to reject these queries or submissions.

As editors, we say “no” a lot. Some of that has to do with the shifting economies of literary publishing in America. Story collections, we’re told, don’t make a lot of money for the big publishers, so they publish fewer of them, which means excellent collections by some of the best writers may end up at small presses and university presses.

Bryan says previous winners and finalists for most of the major story collection contests are among the large list of Pressgang contest entries. I’m not surprised, as we’ve seen a lot of them at Engine Books, too. Pressgang is a new press. Bryan is a fine editor, but Pressgang has only brought one single-author book into the world, so I don’t know how many of those entrants are thinking about the chance to work with Bryan, though they’d be lucky to do so. For 378 authors to pay a fee for their manuscripts to be considered by a promising-but-still-brand-new press means that, more than ever, the burden of supporting new and not-yet-forgotten voices has fallen to smaller presses that are always in need of more resources: more money, more readers, more time.

A small press supported by a university, like Pressgang, might have an easier time finding resources and money. Or maybe not, depending on the university. Either way, though, many of the best and most promising small presses today are operated by a small team of dedicated and hard-working individuals—maybe just one person, even, and usually no more than five. Most of them will not draw even a partial salary. A lot of writers and readers assume small presses are non-profit organizations, but most are not. Not making a profit—even by design, say, in the case of throwing back any profits into the expansion of the small business, or back into the promotion of existing or forthcoming titles—is not the same as being a non-profit, after all.  

These necessary endeavors need our support. It starts with buying the books published by good and promising small presses. I happily bought the first Pressgang release at AWP two years ago, and I’m going to order the current release this week. I own three of the four releases from . I became an early supporter of A/SO, getting a t-shirt right after I sent my money and their first two titles later, upon publication. I’ve bought several titles from Queen’s Ferry Press, including a few hardcovers. And I’ve backed interesting endeavors in every Kickstarter category, including book (and comics) publishing.

For the record, and despite what you might see in articles about publishing, publishers like Graywolf should not be considered a small press. Buy their books, too. They’re usually excellent. But don’t think that you’re supporting small presses by doing so. 

I’m sure there are other examples and worthy presses I could name, but you get my point: If you’re one of the 378 authors who paid a fee to enter Pressgang’s contest (or if you’ve entered any of the other contests—the O’Connor, the AWP prizes, the Iowa one, or whatever), then I hope you’re also buying at least a few books from those publishers. 

I support them by submitting my manuscript and paying the contest fee, you might say. Fair enough. But what happens when you actually win one of these contests? Another lesson I’ve learned from the editor’s desk is that getting your book accepted is really just the beginning.

Writers want editors, yes. But they also want readers.