I have just finished reading this self-styled “jeremiad on the publishing industry”. It dates from early last year and is a fairly standard specimen of the sort of horror-story committed to the Web by disgruntled alumni of the traditional business of publishing books. I am myself an alumnus, though I am no longer disgruntled, having purged my soul some years ago during the pleasurable process of shredding my bulky files of outdated correspondence.
I retained only those papers relating to contractual matters. The rest went largely unseen into the revolving blades. Now and then I caught a glimpse of a line or two and marvelled at the patience and fortitude I had shown; but then I reflected that the alternative would have been to give up any thought of future publication. Even as it was, I strongly suspect I was blacklisted for being “prickly”.
Adjectives have meanings that vary with context. To a publisher, a prickly author is a troublemaker, difficult to work with. To an author, being prickly amounts to meekly asking to see a royalty statement or hoping for a reply, however tardy and nugatory, to one’s letters or telephone calls.
Anyway, enough of that. Though I could easily cap Mr Pickett’s self-pitying howl of dismay (with the backstory on the film made of one of my books), what would be the point? We have moved well beyond the time when tiros needed to be warned away from trad-pub and encouraged to take the self-pub plunge. The benefits of independence are manifest and manifold.
Some of those authors still in thrall to the old system are becoming defensive. They see their advantage melting away, for their perceived advantage and their publishers’ is the same. Their collective condemnation of self-pub will become weaker as more and more of them (a) are squeezed out by the shrinking of their industry or (b) wake up and allow the roasting beans to stimulate their olfactory lobes or (c) both.
Please, then, may we have no more of these rants about trad-pub? It’s just a business, after all, and the function of any business is to make money. Trad authors are merely an overhead and should not be surprised by or resentful of their treatment. If they want to have a say in the matter of their career, they should start a publishing business of their own, as indeed, embracing the new technology, thousands of their more enterprising colleagues have done already.
The structure of a satisfying story is well known: it has a beginning, a middle and an end. That is the broad pattern, but the whole narrative is like a fractal. The beginning itself has a beginning, middle and end; likewise the middle and likewise the end. And if you increase the magnification you will see that everything conforms to a sequence. If this is broken at any point, the story becomes less satisfying.
Let us turn the magnification up to maximum and examine the smallest element of a story, the word. A word must be spelled or pronounced a certain way or it will not be drenustdoo … er, understood. Once the first letter of the first word has been laid down, the subsequent letters must obey the law of sequence or the story will go awry.
The second word is in thrall to the first; the third is even more constrained, because it must follow both the first and the second.
The first sentence has a beginning, middle and end. So do the first paragraph and the first chapter.
As element succeeds element each becomes more constrained, until, in a well constructed story, the final element is inevitable. It will hit the emotional sweet-spot and the reader or listener will be completely satisfied.
Although a born storyteller has an intuitive grasp of this idea, when he is building a complicated story his intuition can be inadequate. Elements of the tale vie with one another for precedence. If one element takes his fancy, he may introduce it too soon and thereby cause a structural problem that leads to writer’s block. Or it may not even belong in the narrative at all, causing an even more severe blockage, especially if he is enamoured of the way he has already presented it.
The law of sequence is ruthless. Any diversion causes reader dissatisfaction. It may appear to the storyteller that he is free to take the narrative in whatever direction he chooses, but this is a fallacy. I have said elsewhere on this blog that, in writing fiction, the subconscious is king, and it is the subconscious that is the final arbiter of sequence. The notion that certain characters take on a life of their own is also fallacious: what really happens is that the conscious mind is surprised by the manifestation of a form that was already present in the subconscious. Equally wrong is the illusion of freedom. The only freedom a storyteller enjoys is to disrupt the sequence and subject himself to the torture of writer’s block.
We can see now why the first line of a novel is so important, and why writers spend so long agonizing over and polishing it. Have a look at these. You will see that its first line contains the very germ of a book, however subtle and compressed it may be.
Correctly used, flashbacks have their proper place in the sequence, which is to provide information needed for subsequent development of the story. When incorrectly used, they annoy and may even exasperate the reader. One of the worst offenders in my reading experience is Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, of which a reviewer says: “Very enjoyable to read, but when I finished I was temped to rip out each chapter and arrange them in chronological order. Written in epistolary and non-sequential style, this novel can be as confusing at times as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” I felt just the same, but wrote the chapter-numbers down in chronological order, then re-read the book that way, whereupon I understood and appreciated it better.
If, as a writer, you find yourself blocked, go back to the start of your story and check that the sequence flows freely. And if, as a reader, you like the style of a book but become dissatisfied with the story, ask yourself whether the sequence is correct. A poor sequence may reveal further weaknesses in the author’s technique, such as an over-reliance on the conscious mind and/or a lack of sincerity. By such means you refine your critical faculties and earn your place in the ranks of the good and great readers, and if this little post helps you in that it will have been well worth its composition.
James Patterson has caused some ripples in the ebook world (see here or even here) by calling for government aid for the traditional publishing model. I’d like to examine his principal delusion: that publishers are the guardians of literary culture.
The first duty of any business is to make a profit and reward its shareholders for their backing. It should also be able to provide its employees – who are investing their time and labour rather than their capital – with job security and decent benefits. Thirdly, it should behave in an ethical way. If for no other reason, to do otherwise will bring the business down, whether by alienating customers or falling foul of the law.
Nowadays it can be hard even to fulfil these modest goals. Furthermore, the big publishers are owned by even bigger, Kraken-like organizations. Compared with the profits from other media, books are mere krill. The Kraken’s fearsome beak is ever in the mind of your average publisher. No wonder he (or she) has become so averse to risk: no wonder we have seen the rise of books by, ghosted for, or about “celebrities” (i.e. people who are prominent elsewhere in the Kraken’s empire).
A myth still exists about book-publishing. Picture an untidy office in Bloomsbury or Manhattan, crowded with bookshelves, heaps of manuscripts, framed book-covers. Seated at the pedestal desk is a kindly fellow, not yet elderly, sporting a bow-tie and a somewhat bohemian hairstyle. He is on the phone to a young author, offering encouragement and reassurance. The firm has already published two of the author’s books, which together sold 403 copies but received gushing reviews. Our publisher Believes in this author and will stick by him until he produces the Breakthrough Novel, whereupon the firm’s faith will be amply rewarded. Our grateful author will then stay with the firm for the rest of his Glittering Career, etc., etc.
Publishers are nothing if not propagandists. The myth of loyalty, if it ever had any foundation in fact, helps justify the low rewards generally accorded to authors by the traditional model. When we consider that publishing is a business, such conduct is incompatible with a publisher’s primary goal – to make a profit. If an author only sells 403 copies of his first two novels, no matter how gushingly praised, his third is unlikely to see the light of day.
A minority of new novels will make much money; a handful will hit the big time. It’s a lottery. Publishers have little idea which ones will succeed and little patience with writers who are initially unsuccessful. Bookstores are even less patient. A new book by an unknown or mid-list writer is given a limited time on the shelves before it is returned, unsold, to the publisher. Retail shelf-space costs money.
The result of all this is that the industry churns out far too many titles. At least 50% of fiction sales are made through word-of-mouth. It takes time for momentum to build and far too few books are given long enough in the sun.
The ebook has changed all that, of course. Now anyone can be a publisher. An ebook is not recalled after two weeks or a month and pulped: it stays in the catalogue. It is just as accessible as any other ebook. It has a chance to recommend itself to readers, and it is the readers, surely, who are the ultimate arbiters of quality.
The ebook has introduced another change, which in time I think will have an even more profound effect on literary culture. More and more backlists are being ebooked, such backlists having been out of print for years and perhaps comprising some really marvellous stuff. New books not only have to compete with other new books, but with all the old ones too. This is raising everyone’s game.
Mr Patterson need not fear the electronic slush-pile, since poor reviews and the retailers’ algorithms make bad books sink. Instead, as a self-styled champion of literature, he should welcome the ebook revolution, even though the general rise in quality might make it harder to sell the sort of works which … well, I think we’d better leave it there.
... the majority of self-published books are self-published because they didn’t make the cut—they failed to interest an agent or a publisher. (An awful lot of them are self-published because the prospective author didn’t want to bother subjecting themselves to the traditional agent/publisher query gauntlet.)
That agent had rejected the query without having asked for sample pages – without even having read a single word of the novel. ...
I said a very naughty word ... and felt something in my head go SNAP. Then I had Scrivener compile the ebook files for the novel, bought some cover art, made a book cover, uploaded everything to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service, and told people on my blog that the novel is available for sale.
Right now that novel is #245 on the Kindle Store, #2 in Military SF on the Kindle, and #13 in the entire Science Fiction category (all print, Kindle, and audiobooks) on Amazon. Right now that novel has sold an ungodly amount of ebook copies for a self-published first-time novel by an unknown author.
Right now I’d like to kiss that agent square on the mouth for being the catalyst that finally made me decide to take the novel’s fate into my own hands.
An excellent result, made the more excellent by his willingness to change his mind. What he may not have realized before is that publishers and agents are just ordinary folks. They have no magic powers. They screw up just as much as anyone else – or perhaps even more, because for generations they have been all-powerful in deciding who gets read, and such a position is awfully conducive to delusion and conceit.
It has been said over and over again in recent years, but it bears repetition – there are two essential people in this game, the author and the reader. The author comes chronologically first because he/she writes the book, but the two are of equal importance, since a book without a reader is nothing. Those who seek to interpose themselves between author and reader must, nowadays, offer a valuable and reasonably priced service; if they don't, they will be ignored.
The book in question is here, and at the time of writing it has climbed to #179 in the amazon.com chart.
I first saw Glengarry Glen Ross about twenty years ago. It made a big impression on me, not least for its excoriation of capitalism, scouring away the epidermis to reveal the unbridled self-interest that lies beneath. Self-interest is the source of the beneficent “invisible hand” revealed in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and I have to say that I have always regarded self-interest as the prime motivator of all living things.
This view was fostered by my training in biology. Even before the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene it had dawned on me that the promotion and replication of one’s own genetic material was the basic driving force in human affairs. My thinking went further: it was the DNA itself (and to an extent, the RNA) that was so ruthless, and our bodies were mere vehicles to be cast aside when we had served our purpose.
Consider human courtship and mating. Generally speaking, we are most attractive to potential mates between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and nature lavishes herself without stint on making young people attractive. She blinds us to the responsibilities and sheer hard work of parenthood; we are suckered by our psychology into the business of passing on our genes. Since human offspring take such a long time to mature, we are encouraged by an elaborate bonding process to stay together until such time as they are independent, after which we are tolerated because we have resources or experience that they may find helpful (in producing their own young); and then, once our usefulness is over, we die.
There are many exceptions to this general pattern, of course. Some males adopt a strategy of spreading their genetic material more widely, and are denounced, especially by females, as “love rats”. Females choose a mate primarily for his genes, but, almost as importantly, also for his likelihood to stick around and help raise the brood. From the male perspective, each of these strategies has its advantages, since the presence of a father is conducive to the successful rearing of children.
And in order to survive to breed and to preserve and promote his young, the individual must selfishly preserve and promote his own health and wellbeing.
What, then, is the biology of altruism? At the university we studied the altruistic – or seemingly altruistic – behaviour of flocks and herds, and of mammals (such as cetaceans) that tend to their sick and disabled. However complex the mathematics, in all such cases there appears to be a benefit to the individual, whether through “paying it forward” or through the establishment of a system that benefits every individual in the group. For example, emperor penguins congregate in autumn on their Antarctic breeding grounds. The females perforce absent themselves to feed during the worst of the polar winter, leaving an all-male crowd behind to carry on the task of incubation. The male balances his egg on his feet and keeps it warm using a special brood-patch. If the temperature of the egg drops below a critical point, even briefly, the embryo will die. The males must survive horrendously low temperatures and storm-force winds. Individually, none of them could make it; but the penguins huddle together in a single, remarkable mass that is constantly circulating. Each bird spends some time on the freezing periphery before his place is taken by another from the blood-warmed centre. Those birds on the periphery are behaving altruistically, even if only for twenty minutes at a time, as are the ones making their way outwards from the centre. Without such co-operation, the whole flock would die.
This behaviour puts one in mind of the extreme courage of parents when their young are threatened. A mother linnet will remain with the nest during a heath fire, and be consumed by it; a number of bird species have evolved so-called distraction displays in which the parent pretends to be injured, gradually luring a predator away from the nest and so exposing itself to danger. A human parent will risk or expend everything to save his or her child from death.
We applaud such bravery, and are moved by the penguins’ stoicism, precisely because we have been programmed by evolution to do so. In analysing our thoughts and reactions, we should never forget that we are animals too. But we are more than mere animals: we have the power of ratiocination, and this is where I come back to Glengarry Glen Ross.
Its author, David Mamet, is rightly celebrated as one of the finest modern playwrights. Glengarry Glen Ross first appeared in 1984, as a play, at a time when Mamet espoused left-wing – what nowadays are termed “liberal” – views. Since then he has made something of a political journey to the right:
For the early-1990s film version of Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet wrote an additional, absolutely electrifying, monologue, delivered by Alec Baldwin:
(NB contains extreme profanity – not safe for work)
Those emperor penguins, in permanent darkness at eighty below, cowering before hundred-mile-an-hour winds, are always closing.
Surely, David Mamet could not have written Baldwin’s speech before he met his new neighbour and started exchanging books.
For a brilliant exposition of the monologue, see this piece
by David Wong. Thanks are due to Mike Cane for putting me onto it and for starting this train of thought.
I’m very pleased to announce that Apple’s U.K. and Ireland iBookstores have included The Penal Colony in their latest selection of Breakout Books. You can find it here, and at the moment that ebook is free to download.
The promotion highlights 55 self-published titles, so this is a significant development for independent authors in general. About 40 of those titles were distributed to Apple by Mark Coker and the Smashwords team, to whom I offer my thanks! For the full story, check out Mark’s latest blog post.
