Margaret's Column

• The 1999 Guide to Literary Agents featured a query letter under the heading ‘Queries That Made It Happen!’. It was from an author with a good track record of short stories, and it was addressed to one of the big agents (I won’t mention names. If you have a copy of the Guide around you can check this). The agent went through the entire letter, detailing what the writer had ‘done right’. The final note touted that the book would be published in 2001. It was published, and it's now out of print.

• A couple of years ago a book was released, from a Major Publisher. It sounded like a gothic/paranormal Victorian caper, obviously timed to cash in on the success of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. It was reviewed prominently on the front page of the New York Times Book Review (publishers ask for that slot), the first page of Entertainment Weekly’s book review section, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. None of them panned the book, but they all said that it was about twice as long as it needed to be. Despite the publisher’s best efforts, the book never showed up on any bestseller lists that I saw.

          Reviews from readers for both books were mixed.

What are we to make of this? The only thing we can make of it is, nothing is certain. An agent likes your book and sends it to an editor who likes it-or at least, who thinks it will sell. In some cases, they may be the last two people who do. As the examples I note above indicate, publishers can’t manufacture a bestseller, or even a modest success. That rests solely in the hands of the reading public.

Most SPA’s (myself included) would jump at an offer from a big publisher. Rightly or wrongly, a mainstream publisher confers legitimacy, particularly among people who’ve never read a self-published book. I’m always pleased for writers who get picked up, whether they got picked up from scratch or started out by self-publishing. But it’s not the end of the battle; it’s just the beginning. All of us are, in Tolkien’s phrase ‘exposing our hearts to be shot at’. Send out those first review copies, tell readers about your work, and be ready for either triumph or heartache.

I’ve never understood why some people are so mean. Because that’s all this is-pure meanness. These people seem to think they're teaching us a lesson about how easy it is to post a fake review; they're not teaching us anything, unless the lesson they want to teach is how full the world is of petty little hobgoblins who are just nasty because no one can stop them from being nasty. We all learned that lesson halfway through our first day of Kindergarten. You can’t teach us anything.

I think these twerps really do believe that any positive review a self-published book gets must be fake. ‘Oh, the author came up with an alias and wrote it’ or ‘the author just got all of their [sic] friends to write these reviews’. That our work is any good doesn’t enter into their muddled little heads; self-financed movies are art; self–produced rock bands have artistic integrity; self-published authors produce nothing but crap. We know that this isn’t true.

These days mainstream publishing is just as corporate and commerce-driven as either Hollywood or the music industry. Their aim is to produce work that moves quickly; hence the cashing in on trends. Music is full of prefabbed teen idols; The studios keep producing one overblown, brainless blockbuster or lame comedy after another. Publishers look for clones of last year’s bestsellers. It’s difficult to get a publisher’s attention if you’ve written anything original. If you write genre fiction, particularly fantasy or science-fiction, it’s well-nigh impossible.

So we must go it alone and do what we can to promote our work. We connect with other writers (who also read), join on-line forums, contact bookstores, and send our books off to reviewers, keeping our fingers crossed that they’ll like it.

Many of these books are first-rate work; their authors don’t need to post fake positive reviews. Plenty of readers will post real ones.