“A Concerned Reader and Writer” wants us to think about something during the long weekend:
“Have publishers completely lost their commitment to literary fiction simply because of the bottom line? Rachel Kahan said [in an earlier GalleyCat post] that she was proud to publish commercial fiction because it catered to her readers’ taste. A smart enough market decision for an editor to make, after all. But… is it because commercial fiction is simply safe and comfortable? Does that philosophy completely dominate the decision to take on an ‘edgier’ author? Would any publisher out there dare to publish Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses now, if they could foresee what havoc it would stir up? Are there novels and non-fiction books out there that are intelligent and provocative, but a publishing house would pass on because they are dangerous (the opposite of comfortable) and make readers think and react? Are publishers becoming just a little ‘too comfortable’ to take risks now?”
“Have publishers completely lost their commitment to literary fiction simply because of the bottom line?” What, you seriously want to suggest that there’s no literary fiction being published anymore? That’s just insane. Notice, too, the false binary distinction between “commercial” and “literary” writing, as well as the lazy assumption that “edgy” writing is the same as “intelligent and provocative” writing and “commercial” is the same as “safe and comfortable,” which is a fallacy we dealt with last month when the “alternative” poseurs started demanding their own section at Amazon.com. The real problem with these questions is the idea that all publishing houses think alike, and that they’d all reject a manuscript for the same “cowardly” reasons. If this were true, agents would never have to go door-to-door again; they could just set up auctions for everything and cast aside the authors who couldn’t attract any bidders.
Are there novels and nonfictions (yeah, it’s an ugly word, but technically I should be on holiday, so I’m not wasting time looking for another) out there that are too unsettling, aesthetically or ideologically, for commercial publishers to accept? Undoubtedly. Does that mean no publisher would take such books on? Not necessarily; any number of independent presses abound, catering to all points on the aesthetic and ideological spectrum. And, frankly, the ease with which anybody can self-publish these days means that no author can use a lack of interest from publishers as an excuse any more. If getting your uncomfortable message out to the world and forcing it to think and react means that much to you, stop waiting for somebody else to do you a favor and publish the book yourself.
Is that a hard path? Yes. And the odds are good that you won’t make a lot of money at it, especially if you’re a quitter. So you have to ask yourself: Is your message so important that you’d be willing to give over a huge chunk of your life to getting it out? And if you can’t say “yes,” then why should you expect anybody else to care about your book either?