Stop Asking For Validation

But You Can Always Ask For Money

If you follow discourse about the publishing industry, you’ve likely already seen this piece by Elle Griffin. It’s about—stop me if you’ve heard this—the woes of publishing and what they mean now and in the future for writers, readers, and books.

Griffin’s title makes her piece sound like more of a screed than it really is. “No one buys books” is not, of course, an accurate statement. According to market research company Circana, 767 million (!) print books were sold in the United States in 2023. That’s over three-quarters of a billion books before we even start counting ebooks and audiobooks. (I was glad to see that fiction sales grew a bit last year, given that fiction has been the commercial poor cousin of narrative writing in recent years.) Sure, a lot of those books are Bibles, or textbooks, or pop star memoirs, or self-help treatises called How To Be A Mega-F*ck, but they are nonetheless books that are being sold for money.

The Reader, Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Instead of an exposé about how no one buys books, Griffin’s piece is best read as a lavishly cited tour around what the Random House trial revealed about the jankiness of the commercial publishing business model. There are lots of quotes and numbers—read it for yourself and see. There are reminders that most books don’t sell out their advance, that most books don’t have much of a marketing budget behind them, that most books sell very few copies whatsoever.

A representative passage:

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

Useful info, if a bit depressing.

Based on Griffin’s piece and everything else I’ve ever read, heard, and experienced, my conclusion is that books don’t face much existential risk, either as a form or as a product. It’s been true for years, for instance, that it’s easy to pirate what is in fact just a large document full of text. And yet, most readers are more than happy to pay for a book. (Is there another product that benefits so much from sentimentality and a sense of inherent virtue in its proper consumption? Maybe fancy vegetables?)

So we’re not really talking about the fate of books as such, but about whether the legacy business model of commercial publishing can endure, and what might happen if it fails. We’re simply talking about business. What form this particular business takes does have big implications for writers and readers alike. Imperfect as the New York-based legacy houses might be, I doubt anyone is naive enough to think we’d all be better off if the remaining bulwarks gave way and Amazon finally ran all of commercial publishing.

At the moment, I’m trying to sell a novel, which means that of course I have sweatily intensive opinions about all of this. I’ve been trying to sell this book since last October, with no luck so far. I would like something from publishers that I’m not getting. So you can accuse me of bitterness for what I’m about to say, and you’d be right. I’m bitter about this nagging tension between trying to write something that’s actually good on the one hand, and then begging for-profit corporations to validate it on the other.

When I first started writing this paragraph, it was a lot more strongly worded: “The upshot of the state of publishing in 2024 is that writers cannot and should not look to commercial publishers for validation. If there was a time when the major for-profit players had a special power to confer legitimacy on writers and their work, that time has long since passed.” That feels too stentorian by half. I’m pointing out a basic antagonism between art and commerce, not listing demands to a hostage negotiator.

Hostages are a decent metaphor, come to think of it. Writers let ourselves get held prisoner by our notions of who gets to legitimate us—not only publishers, but professors, critics, other writers, hoopleheads on Twitter. I’ve felt this, as has every writer I know—if you write seriously and you haven’t felt it, please share your secrets. Part of the problem is that most of us have gotten a lot of our training in the setting that most cannily bends you toward seeking approval: Universities. That’s a whole other essay I’ll write one day.

None of this is to say that you’re always right if you simply declare you’ve written something good. It’s also not to say that the answer to all of this is for us to upload pdfs of our unpublished novels to Substack. There can be a lot of good in embracing criticism, letting yourself be gatekept in certain ways, and trying to be rewarded for what you do.

All I’m saying is this: You can’t look to a business concern for artistic validation in the best of times, and you’d be a fool to do so when that business concern can barely sort out its own strategies for survival. In my perfect world, there’d be a clear understanding that asking someone to print and distribute your book is a business deal and nothing else. Selling your book is selling your product for money; it’s not a transference of sacred energies in which the spirit of Maxwell Perkins manifests and tells you that you remind him a lot of “Scotty” Fitzgerald.

The nice thing is, there’s still plenty of money being made in publishing—billions of dollars every year, on the backs of those hundreds of millions of books being sold. You can and should try to get some of that bread for yourself, if you’ve written a book. If you want money up front—often more money than your book will ultimately be worth, in strictly business terms, given what we know about most books not selling enough to recoup their advance—the big, old houses are the best place to look for it. You may not get what you ask for, but there’s no reason not to ask. We all need to eat, and writers tend to be hungry.

Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that a shaky group of companies have a monopoly on validating you and your work. If anyone ends up with any kind of monopoly in the realm of books, it will be Amazon, and we’ll have even more to complain about.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

They’ve got superior technology:

What caught my eye here, as we near the end of the alien-leaf arc, was Calvin’s faith in technology. There’s a much longer essay to be written here, but I’m fascinated by shifting perception of “technological innovation” in the broader culture over the past few decades. Maybe one of these days I’ll write about it. Suffice it to say that it would help a lot if Google search still worked.

The fun thing about aliens is that they really do have superior technology. The sci-fi technology we like to fantasize about, and which never quite seems to manifest in real life. Calvin has a yen for sci-fi imaginings, such as his cardboard-box “transmogrifier.” It occurs to me that, while I’ve projected a future for Calvin (who is an archetypal Millennial, in his age and other ways) as a weed dispensary employee in exurban Ohio, there’s another plausible path in which he gets into writing code circa 2005 and ends up doing quite well for himself.

As for Calvin’s faith that someone will do something just because they said so, well, Calvin’s frictionless sense of justice is his great semi-submerged virtue. As always, Hobbes is here to offer some wised-up perspective.

A Poem

Paul Muldoon is a-flicking through deckle-mold.