Very true! It’s like a record label saying “we want the next top band and we need to be certain they’ll sell records! … Oh wait, you’ve already sold 10,000 records off your own back? Sorry, we want someone we know will sell that’s so far sold nothing”… What?!

At face value this post raises some industry points that appear amazing and exciting, but when you start to think about it, it’s really got just as many problems as the “old” publishing game.

The average pot-boiler, even in paper back, makes steady income for the publisher and the writer. If it appeals to a particular audience, romance, adventure, mystery, whatever, it can sell well and be a money-maker.

I suspect a lot of publishers are concentrating more on the changing business plan of their trade. e-books, print on demand, and internet access to both mean the publishing business will have to adapt or die. I have been trying to publish my own novel and am now thinking it would be far easier to simply self-publish as an ebook and sell through e-bay on on various web sites devoted to those than try to attract the notice of overworked agents and editors.

My reaction to these books has made me very hard on myself and I rewrote my Gothic Faery tale “The Golden Stairs” 35 times smoothing and polishing, injecting emotion — each foray has a different quality and focuses on different aspects of the story — because I want it smooth and flowing and seamless.

When I used to read books as child I would get so lost in the author’s world that I often missed being called to supper — I tuned out everything. That is the standard I strive to achieve in my writing. It takes time and Grim Reaper is always looking over my shoulder telling me to get on with it.

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

All this shows is the fickle nature of the publishing beast today. A true writer will write and write and write and write until their fingers throb and there is no story left for them to tell. A true writer is creative in spite of the commerce…. and the readership will pick up on that fact. It might take a couple o, or even a few books time; but the compelled writer can wait.

I’ve been working on my fourth (unpublished) manuscript and I’m eight months in and still researching and planning. I’ve got a couple of paragraphs to set the tone and remind me what I’m aiming for but beyond that this project is proving to be the most challenging thing I have ever undertaken. My panic now is, knowing this is going to take me at least a couple of years to get right, will it have been worth the effort? I know it’s different to other work out there, already published, both in structure and style and it’s got brains but is that enough?

Did they all just submit a manuscript “over the transom” that sat on some jr editor’s desk for 6 months, was finally glanced at, tossed in a sr. editor’s in-box where it sat for another 4 month’s before, to distract herself during a messy divorce, the sr. editor finally read the manuscript one long weekend.

Did author and publisher meet at an expensive writer’s conference that the author got to attend because they previously won a grant from a university writing workshop because their father (a nobel prize winner physicist) was having an affair with the professor running the workshop?

The image of “editors prowling” makes me think more of a bar in Hemmingwayland than a covey of publisher people stalking through a fields of writers wearing signs stating “Hot Debut Writer Here”.

These are the kind of things we need to know.

(from the latest post on the Wylie-Merrick agency blog)

“The reason is there isn’t much in publishers’ budgets these days to promote debut author’s books. One would think that large portion of ad dollars would go toward helping newly published author’s career off the ground, but that’s not the case.”

http://blog.wylie-merrick.com/

>:(

Here’s a question for you: when the publisher shells out a large advance, how much of that do they expect the author to spend on marketing the novel?