In a Substack post, Brian Niemeier accurately describes the way the publishing industry has changed in recent decades. He argues that the way forward now for the writer (and other artists, if one may so term writers) is to seek what he calls ‘Neopatronage’ – neo in the sense that it differs from the sort of patronage bestowed on artists all the way from antiquity until the emergence of commercial publishing.
Neopatronage seeks financial support directly from the audience rather than through the medium of intermediaries such as publishers, bookshops, record labels, etc., all of which tend to extract more money from the audience than the artists themselves. That is all very fine until you consider the fact that most people are unwilling to pay anything at all because they regard what is on the internet as free. Writers in English must also take into account the steep and accelerating decline in literacy in Britain and north America, our two principal markets.
I am not arguing for a return to the humiliating grind of (a) trying to find an agent who will even look at your book and then (b) hoping some august being will actually stoop to publish it. What’s more, in London and probably New York too, publishers now employ ‘sensitivity readers’, typically young women fresh from indoctrination in a university, whose job it is to comb through the text searching for anything liable to offend anyone, anywhere, particularly the pets of the central banks and, below them, the giant corporations who these days run the largest and most powerful publishing companies.
So even if an author gets to first base in the legacy publishing process, he, or these days, more likely, she, will immediately come up against one of these censorettes and her felt-tip pen. This is after, of course, the text has been deemed generally acceptable by the publishing director.
In my case I would last no more than fifteen minutes of sensitivity reading and the business relationship would be over before it had barely started.
Censorship of what is published online is in its infancy but is due to get worse. Much worse. Amazon already bans political books it considers us too delicate to see. It and most other online marketplaces (e.g. Apple Books, Kobo, Smashwords) have strict rules about publishing the worst filth, which I quite understand and indeed approve of. The world is knee-deep in that as it is.
I am afraid the prospects for authors grow grimmer by the year. I foresee a time when new work is distributed as samizdat and the author receives nothing except social invitations – with luck.
In my own circumstances, this does not bother me. There are far more efficient ways to make money than writing; the vast majority of published writers have waged or salaried employment anyway. They write in the evenings or at weekends or whenever they can. The more enterprising ones get hold of a sinecure in the public sector where nobody much cares what they are doing, and write at ‘work’.
My own exposure to mainstream publishing ended in the early nineties, the last book being first published in 1987; my further dealings with HarperCollins related only to subsidiary rights. In fact, after what Hollywood did to that story I gave up writing altogether in disgust and co-founded a business.
But writing is a disease and I could not keep away. By 2000 I had finished another novel. My agent received generally favourable reports from publishers’ readers but nobody was buying. I hadn’t realised that in the years I had been away the landscape had changed.
Like its predecessor, that novel is a thriller: a commercial decision on my part. I hadn’t much enjoyed some sections of the narrative but felt that I needed to capitalise on the success of the previous book. Indeed, I would rather have written something else. When my agent, expressing puzzlement and regret, eventually abandoned her search, I decided to write what I wanted to write.
That book couldn’t find a publisher either. I continued writing anyway, and as I did so it dawned on me that things had changed. I gradually gave up thinking about legacy publishing and was writing merely as a hobby. This gave me complete artistic freedom, which I love.
Then in 2010 or so, Smashwords, Amazon’s KDP and whatnot started up and I found I could make some pocket-money from my efforts. That is where I am today. I can write whatever I want. Writing, for me, has become largely an exercise in self-realisation. It helps with exploring who I am and my place among my fellows. If other people like reading what I turn out, I am of course very pleased, because part of my motive remains to entertain and perhaps inform others. But it is only a part, and if nobody likes my books that is OK too.
I will not seek Neopatronage. It takes too much effort for too little reward.
Besides, I have inherited the unbecoming and groundless pride of the Irish, overcoming which is proving intractably difficult, even with the help of my keyboard.
