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April 25, 2008
Boy I dislike publishers
i. a hell of a lot of shitty books get published every year
ii. my book is better than a lot of them
iii. therefore my book will get published
Before I embarked on the long nightmare of trying to get published, I actually believed in this naive syllogism. I've since discovered that something goes badly wrong between propositions ii and iii. There's no "therefore" about it. Also, in publishing, words like "better than" effectively have no meaning.
Don't believe me? Earlier this week I came across an insufferable little book that proves my point. It's called - give me something to bite on while I type this out - 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might. It's published by Penguin, and it's written by an editor/publisher/all-round tool named Pat Walsh.
Now, to an unpublished writer any published book amounts to a kind of slap in the face. It says to you: hey pal, this is what we publish instead of you. But Walsh's book is a slap in the face followed by a pool cue to the back of the head and a boot to the spine. I used to think, parochially and incorrectly, that the publishing industry's suicidal aversion to books and writers was a phenomenon confined to Australia. To judge by Walsh it's global. So forgive me if I treat his nauseating book at some length.
Walsh is billed as two things: a dispenser of hard-won pearls of publishing wisdom, and a wit. We already have the book's rib-tickling title as an example of the latter. Let's hear some of the wisdom. This is from page one:
"There is no singular thing that makes someone a writer, but there is one thing that makes someone a joke - talking about writing a book without doing any work."
There's a blend of illiteracy and impertinence here that's typical of the Walsh style. First, the impertinence. Someone who talks about a book without writing it is not merely a slightly flawed person, okay? He's a joke. Walsh has a suspiciously strong urge to put the boot into failed writers. This is a curious quality in a book aimed at failed writers. It's as if he wants to put as much distance between them and himself as possible. It's as if he fears that this distance won't be evident to us without his pointing it out all the time.
As well he might. Look again at the sentence quoted above. Walsh apparently thinks "singular" is a high-toned way of saying "single". It isn't. Look it up. And Walsh is - let's repeat it - the veteran publisher, the guy who's been around the block, the guy who chooses what books you'll read and what books you won't, the guy who knows so much about editing that he's qualified to write a whole book about it. Indeed his 22nd chapter - his 22nd reason why your book probably won't be published - is entitled "You Do Not Know Enough Vocabulary." Here he is, then: the hard-bitten realist who doesn't really know very much. The grizzled master of vocab who doesn't know how to look up a dictionary.
There's an old American expression used to denote a large quantity of bullshit: it's 12 pounds of bullshit in a ten pound bag. Books like this - and the stores are fucking full of them - don't even attain to that state. They oblige us to reverse the metaphor. The bag is actually pretty impressive. You've got your high-concept cover. You've got your would-be punchy title. You've got your market-friendly built-in readership. This is a twelve-pound bag all right. But there's something deficient about the bullshit. There's not enough of it to justify the bag. There's only about a pound of it: a few untrue truisms, a couple of tepid observations, some lame puns. So the bullshit needs to be rounded out, inflated. Each feeble assertion needs to be turned into its own chapter, individually numbered and headed, surrounded by white space as if it's a Nietzschean aphorism. Exceedingly banal statements - "There is no single thing that makes someone a writer" - must be made to sound as if they actually mean something. So you change single to singular, and hope for the best.
Okay, here's another Walshean pearl:
"For the most part, we judge a book primarily on its cover letter."
And here's Walsh IN AN ONLINE INTERVIEW, riffing on the same "idea":
"I often say that cover letters should take ten to twenty hours of solid work. It should be damn perfect. And it should come across as if it took you ten minutes. It is your face on the first date. It is all in that first impression. And still people are shocked at how much sloppiness there is."
On this point I have to admit that Walsh has opened my eyes, as well as turning my stomach. I've sent out more than my fair share of failed submissions, with an equal number of covering letters on top of them. I can't recall what I said in those letters. If I gave much thought to them, it was along these lines: let's make this short and sweet, because only an unbelievable asshole would conclude anything, anything at all, on the basis of a covering letter. I stand by my reasoning; although I'm now ready to concede, thanks to Walsh, that I was wrong to suppose I wouldn't be dealing with incredible assholes. I mean: Why? Why pay so much attention to the covering letter, particularly when most writers won't know, and can hardly be expected to guess, that you're going to do that? Yes, I can see that publishers have great tottering stacks of submisisons to deal with. Yes, I can see that they might have five minutes, even thirty seconds, to check out each submission. Fine. But why spend those seconds sampling the covering letter rather than the work itself? It seems an arbitrary choice. Have you no confidence in your ability to distinguish good work from bad? Or are you looking for the angle, the pitch? If so, what's the point of you? You're already thinking like a marketer, so why not send the letter straight to the marketers and dispense with the fiction that editorial taste has anything to do with it? I suppose I can imagine myself getting so sick of reading submissions that I could no longer be fucked to look at anything beyond the covering letter. But I doubt I'd want to brag about that, let alone speak of it as if it were an inviolable law of the universe. (I'd better give Walsh some points for candour, then: given that this is the way he goes about things, he's at least honest enough not to pretend otherwise.)
At one point in his book Walsh has the audacity to quote - favourably - from Ulysses. Does he really delude himself into believing that Ulysses, if submitted to him today, would somehow make it through his idiotic sieve? Can we really imagine Joyce blindly sweating over a covering letter?
Here's Walsh, IN THAT SAME INTERVIEW, casting his eye over another literary work, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces:
"That book was great. Not only in terms of story and storytelling, but also in terms of serving as an inspirational hope for so many. It is also a good example of timing. I mean if he had been published in 1972, which is, I think, when he started sending it out, it wouldn't have worked. He was far ahead of the publishing world. If he had stuck it in a draw [sic - although not Walsh's fault] and worked on something else and resubmitted it ten years later it would have worked. It just wasn't the time for that book. And some writers are lucky and they write the book that it's the right time for right then."
This is bizarre stuff. You could almost conclude that Walsh doesn't know that Toole killed himself well before the book's publication, partly as a result of its rejection. Granted, it's almost inconceivable that anyone who has even vaguely heard of Toole could not know that; but if Walsh knows it, how can he possibly think that Toole's biography offers "inspirational hope"? Also, by 1972 Toole had been dead for three years; he had started hawking his novel in the early sixties. But Walsh isn't really a facts man. He deals in abstract "realities", and somehow he's vaguely convinced himself that the "time", irrespective of when it actually was, just wasn't the time for that book. In other words, he complacently allows himself to believe that the publishing industry somehow got it right about Toole; and that cynical numbers-men like himself would, if given the same opportunity today, get it right again. To anyone outside the publishing industry, the moral of the Toole story is rather different. The publishers fucked up royally, and the book came within a whisker of never being published at all. It was only the tenacity of Toole's mother, and the good taste of Walker Percy, that saved it from oblivion.
One more thing before I go. Walsh comes down particularly hard on self-publishing, especially of the internet variety. But what possible business is it of his if unpublished writers refuse to take the verdict of people like him - a verdict that his book painstakingly reveals to be arbitrary, cavalier and asinine - as the final word? Unpublished books, say whatever else you like about them, are rarely as cynical as this one is. Rejected writers should have no problem sleeping at night, although most of them probably do. Writers like Walsh should lose sleep, but probably don't. A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, as Oscar Wilde said.