LESSONS FROM THE TRADITIONAL-PUBLISHING MODEL Part One: THE BOOK, THE BOOK, THE BOOK!

Traditional publishing is in the toilet.  Big news flash, right?  I lined out some of the whys in my recent guest blog on Authorlink.com

But what can we learn from big publishers’ successes and failures?  A lot.  So let’s dive in and today talk about the thing new writers are missing all over the place—putting the product, the book, first.

 

This really does seem like a no-brainer.  I mean, we’re writers, right?  It’s what we do—we write, we hone our craft, we study, we get critiqued, we write some more.  At least, that’s the way it used to be!

 

One of the issues new writers (and many seasoned ones as well, although they handle it differently) have with the Traditional folks is that this takes f o r e v e r.   Yep, it does.  At every single stage of the process, writers get to hurry-up-and-wait.  Hurry up and produce exactly what that agent, editor, etc., requests, and then sit on their hands for months and wait on responses.  It can drive a sane woman batty.  I’m in the process of getting one of my great YA writers agented, and of course, as it’s August and all of publishing is on vacation, my writer is frustrated that the agent won’t read his work until September.  Hey!  That’s actually quick!

 

But back to our point.  What this enormous time lag did was to give writers all this glorious waiting time to actually focus on the book.  To learn.  While they banged their heads against publishing’s seemingly impenetrable wall, they wrote.  Joined critique groups.  Got bashed there.  Went back and dove in again to make the story better.  Worked with an editor.  Wrote some more.

 

All of this took years.  But now, with the advent of instant publishing, you don’t have to go through all of that.  Presto!  Your book can be published without having to do all that incessant waiting.  You’re an author!

 

But not a very good one.  The waves and waves of schlock being “published” these days boggles the mind.  Oh my, is so much of this stuff just terrible.  Cringe-worthy awful.

 

And here’s the dirty little secret Traditional publishers know: You can put megabucks behind a new release’s marketing.  Hire PR agents.  Get the best cover in the world.  And maybe sell a lot of books because of all that.  But if the book’s bad, readers won’t buy the second one.  In other words, you’ve totally lost the audience you worked so hard with marketing money to create.

 

You’re the same way, right?  You buy a highly touted book and by page five, it’s so awful you toss it into the trash, never to read that author again.  And I mean, ever.  No matter if said author ends up on the morning television shows touting her next one.  What sticks with you is the awfulness of what your hard-earned money was wasted on.

 

But then, the converse is also true, no?  You read something wonderful, and seek out that author’s backlist, while waiting eagerly for the next one.  I did that very thing with Pat Conroy not long ago.  For whatever reason, I picked up The Prince of Tides for the fourth time (one of my all-time favs, obviously).  Then I got on a Conroy jag, reading the ones I hadn’t read, while waiting eagerly for The Death of Santini.  They could package up the yellow pages and put Conroy’s name on it, and I’d buy it.

 

Of course, Pat Conroy came of writing age during the time when the only choice was to hone one’s craft.  Learn from him!  Dive in, learn your craft, hone it and hone it and hone it.  Have a great editor sign off on it before the presses run.  Ah, now you have a budding career as a book author!