Stop Asking For Validation, Part II

But You Can Always Ask For Clarity

A wise person once told me, “Clarity is kindness.” This is one of those Peak Therapy Era maxims that’s worth pondering, especially if it goes against your upbringing.

I didn’t grow up in the midst of clarity. I was raised in a small town in a deep-red state in the Nineties and Aughts, which meant that most adults I dealt with considered it to be a personal affront if they were asked to explain themselves. Now that I’m the same age as many of them were back then, I can see that this was at least partly because they often couldn’t articulate their own reasoning. They were just doing what they felt they had to.

As we discussed in the last installment of this newsletter, publishers are also doing what they feel they have to, rather than what our lofty notions want them to do.

Nihonbashi Fish Market Prosperity, Utagawa Kuniyasu

It would be unreasonable, at least in the near term and with all else being equal, to hope that commercial publishing stops emphasizing the “commercial” over the “publishing.” Call it a symptom of the financialization of corporations in general, of late-stage capitalism, of growing inequality and the anxieties it brings, of simple lack of vision. However you want to frame the problem, large publishers feel a lot of pressure at the moment, and they’re responding by narrowing the possibilities for fiction in particular. That’s just the state of play.

But! We can always do each other the kindness of clarity. For instance, more publishers could send out rejection notes as candid, revealing, and useful as this one we recently received regarding my novel:

Much as we admired and enjoyed [Novel], we’re just not the right publisher for the book, for reasons we’ll attempt to explain.  First, as you likely know, nearly all independent publishers are some form of non-profit with other sources of funding like grants, charitable donations, educational and corporate sponsorships, and so on; [Our publisher] is one of the few independents with international distribution that is (deliberately) not a non-profit, so our primary source of funding is sales of our titles.  Second, while both our audience and promotion network are made up of readers of complex, innovative, and language-intensive fiction ([Novel we published] for example is currently selling its 11^th print run with around 15,000 readers), our novels tend to have fairly propulsive narratives that start quickly, as anything that’s slow to develop is quite difficult for us to sell in the current market.  Since the Southard novel is beautifully written and has an interesting structure, you might try someone like [Other Independent Publisher] in [Big City] (assuming you’ve already tried the usual suspects), as they’d be better positioned to market the book, and find the sort of audience it no doubt deserves. In any case, thanks so much for letting us read this, and sorry we can’t be of more help in getting it out, as we all thoroughly enjoyed the read."

Because this note praises my novel, let’s stipulate for the purposes of this essay that they’re completely wrong and my novel is actually bad, mad, unprofitable to know, etc. And it might be! It’s been hard to find a publisher for it. So maybe the book is just bad, and the praise here is undeserved, and I’ll get to keep whining about all of this forever because no one will publish my awful novel.

The point is, their rejection note is both honest and actionable. The honesty comes in the form of foregrounding that this is a proposed business deal—not a request for spiritual affirmation—and that they don’t believe they’re the right publisher to sell copies of this book. My work doesn’t strike them as compatible with their business model, so they’re not going to buy it. More than fair, and much more direct than publishers tend to be.

Even better, they then actually give us some input we can make use of. Most explicitly, they make a specific publisher recommendation. Much appreciated, and makes me suspect the praise was at least partly sincere, since otherwise they probably wouldn’t take the time. More subtly, they suggest that, in their reading, the novel is slow and unusually structured, the implication being these are things we could consider changing if we wanted to make it more marketable.

(For what it’s worth, I agree that the novel’s structure is on the odd side, though I like to think it’s a little more propulsive than they suggest. Reasonable minds will differ, of course, particularly when there’s money at stake. And again, we’re stipulating here that my novel is bad and any praise is besides the point—but I couldn’t resist.)

The upshot here is that I believe everyone involved would be better off if publishers gave more responses that looked like this. Writers, agents, editors—we’d all be happier if we could be more honest with one another. When we’re talking about business deals, it will never hurt us to cut the treacly bullshit and talk about why a deal is or isn’t happening. I’d go so far as to guess that doing so would actually make us feel better about this whole entangled enterprise, because that’s what tends to happen when you can bring yourself to stop fronting.

Clarity is kindness, as they say, towards others and towards yourself.

Some housekeeping: I’m considering monetizing this newsletter at some point. Not any time soon; adding a paid subscription tier would involve me posting a lot more frequently, and otherwise working to make sure paid subscribers were getting some bang for their buck.

In the meantime, you can do me a big favor: If you think you’d be interested in being a paid subscriber in the future, you can use Substack’s handy pledge function to let me know and give me some sense of current interest. I think the “subscribe” button below will show up as a “pledge” button if you’ve already subscribed?

I promise I will give you lots and lots of notice before charging anyone any money. If you don’t feel comfortable formally pledging, you can let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in a paid (and thus more prolific) version of this newsletter. Thanks!

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

We’re casting stones inside glass houses:

This strip is a classic case of Calvin’s glaring flaws being transmuted into an irony so obvious it’s almost a parable. This arc began, of course, with Calvin procrastinating on a leaf-collecting assignment, only to encounter some aliens and make a deal with them to hand over the earth in return for a selection of alien leaves. It’s not working out so hot.

It’s been nearly 30 years since C+H ended its run. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that Calvin’s grandiosity—e.g., his willingness to do anything other than actually do his homework, including cutting a wickedly unfavorable deal with alien invaders—put him well ahead of his time. It often feels like no one can keep anything in proportion anymore; every problem is the worst thing that’s ever happened. Blame smartphones or something.

Calvin doesn’t have that excuse. As usual, the story sets him up to not have any excuses at all. I find myself wishing that he were in the right just a little more often.

A Poem

Tony Hoagland has news for us.