The Traditional Publishing Scam
In former times–meaning antedeluvian–I worked for a small press. I reviewed unsolicited manuscripts, called the slush pile, to locate undiscovered gems for publication and I also did some editing. Not once did the small press publish anything that came over the transom. If they wanted to publish something like a vampire novel, for instance, instead of putting something from the slush pile under contract, they would assign the task of writing the desired mss to one of the staff editors and totally ignore the slush pile. The editor, who usually had a publishing history, would then get to work in his or her spare time and crank out a vampire novel. Nice work if you can get it.
This makes me think of the old structure of “authorship” and the exploitive process of a writer getting published.
First, the writer hunkers down and hammers out an outline for a novel. It’s always a novel, by the way. Keep in mind that everyone–and I mean absolutely everyone–eventually writes a novel, usually about their “amazing” life which no one but their mother will ever read. Case in point: an engineer friend of mine, now deceased, wrote a book on pipelines. He put it on Amazon and to his surprise it sold a hundred copies a month for year after year with zero marketing. “This is way easy,” he said to himself and he wrote a novel and posted it on Amazon too. Zilch. Zero sales. Year after year went by with no sales despite herculean efforts on his part to push the book. And it was not even about his “amazing” life. Today over a million books are “published” each year, most of them fiction or autobiographical, or both, most self-published, and the number is increasing every year. And most are never read by anyone once the writer runs out of friends and family.
That bit of info is just to alert the reader as to the realities of fiction publishing. I don’t call it a marketplace because publishing is not a marketplace, but a monopoly. You can always tell a monopoly because monopolies can afford to fire their customers. Amazon bans books by the hundred–that’s because Amazon functions as a monopoly. The biggest distributor, Ingram, also fires its own customers, routinely putting publishers out of business because Ingram is also a monopoly.
New York publishers function as a monopoly also because they work together to screen out “heretical” writers and ensure that they will all publish the same ideological slant to the same targeted audience. New York publishing companies are mostly owned by multinational megacorps with oodles of advertising dollars which they can use across multiple venues to make sure the books the publishers wish to push on the public conform to their biases and ideological preconceptions. Monopolies can afford to act this way because profit is not their chief motive–pushing their ideology is. This is called ESG.
After completing your outline, you will then create a first draft, which you will be advised by some of the great many ancillary businesses that prey on would-be authors to submit your work to a “beta reader”. Professional readers, as the term suggests, charge money for this service. Usually the writer will skip the “professional” part and contact a friend who is known to write a bit on the side, for instance a diary, and dragoon the reluctant friend into plowing through the first draft. It’s hard to say which is better: the friend who doesn’t want to offend you, or the “professional” who will quickly “correct” your draft into the kind of ideological drivel that cash-paying publishers want.
Then comes editing. Again, some will pay cash for a professional first draft initial editor, as if every joe and his dog don’t know how to compose sixth grade English, while the thrifty writers will dragoon another friend for some kind of barter deal.
Once the writer makes the recommended “corrections”, which are certain to remove any spontaneity the manuscript (mss) formerly possessed, our forlorn, and now perhaps poor-lorn writer, will turn his work over to what’s called a developmental editor. They are even more expensive because they actually look at such items as character development, and analyzing the work for the required 25% intro, 50% body, and 25% resolution portions. As if readers give a flying F for such things. But you’ll be told you have to do these.
Next comes the copy editor. If we don’t yet have enough cooks in the kitchen to completely flatten and obliterate any creativity that remains in this crockpot, the copy editor will entangle you in a ridiculous series of nose-heightened “writers’ style manuals” that will dictate where you must put your Oxford commas, and apostrophes, and hyphens while catching misspelled words, as if Word won’t already do that.
And we’re still not done. Next in line is the professional editor who will rapidly transform your once charming story into a dreary, predictable, boring tale devoid of any style at all.
The predators, in fact, will keep coming as long as your bank account holds out: the format editor, more beta readers, more reviews by copy and characterization editors, etc.
Whew. Finally, after all has been lost, it’s time to submit your work to an agent. Don’t ask the silent questions like, for example, is the agent married to a conglomerate publisher, which in effect means the publisher will double-dip into your royalties. These swindles are yet another dirty secret of New York publishing. Agents too operate effectively as a monopoly, in fact are part of the NY publishing monopoly, acting as recruiters for their very selective recruitment of writers in exchange for kickbacks from the orgs they pretend to “negotiate” with.
If your mss is too long, the agent may reject it and reject you. If your mss is very short, meaning no longer than a few scribbles on a page, then your agent might be willing to market it to a magazine. If medium length, the agent might be willing to market it to a select book publisher. But if your mss is in-between in length, then it’s a novella, and the agent will reject it and you because no one publishes novellas anymore because monopolies can publish whatever they like and they don’t like novellas.
But to give agents their due, they actually sometimes are honest and have a difficult job. This is because NY publishers today have not only a litmus test which will automatically exclude a writer’s work, but now excludes writers themselves, sight unseen, and work unread, specifically white males.
Case two in point: Equus Publishing is open to msss (how often is that spelled?) by writers. I receive a steady stream of submissions, sometimes with explanations of why they have come to Equus instead of to an agented NY publisher. A recent writer told me that his agent helped him place several books with NY publishers and they have all sold well, even reviewed by the NY Times Book Review (one of the conglomerate venues I mentioned that NY publishers use to promote their chosen ideologically favored books, much like the Oscars and just as honest). But despite this success, he suddenly has a problem: his agent is firing him. Why? Because the NY publishing monopoly is no longer accepting manuscripts from white males. So she can no longer place any more books by him no matter how creative and brilliant his books are.
So it’s no longer enough to merely comply with the octopus-like PC Cult, but white males are now heretics by definition and can no longer publish, no matter the quality of what they write. If you are a white male, you have been or will soon be fired and your msss rejected, both sight unseen, and no agent will represent you.
Let’s say you do have a sizable dose of melanin, or you feel like a 13 year old girl today although you are in fact a 56 year old man. Thus you qualify to bypass the ideological screening. But if you are still not part of the in-crowd, there will be no $ up front, no marketing, perhaps misspelled words on the cover of your book (that happened to me), and you will have to resign yourself to criss-crossing the country doing all the marketing yourself at your own expense, because advance fees only go to former presidents or select members of the chosen few. The more books you sell, the deeper in debt you will go.
This whole traditional publishing framework works like this because it is driven by advertising. IOW, the reading audience does not buy books, rather books are sold to them. The monopolies and their conglomerates know that because they have the dollars and the advertising venues, they can sell whatever they wish to the public and the public will buy it so long as it’s not written above a sixth grade level. It is not a market, but a cash cow of Manchurian Candidates, a public so conditioned that the moneyed publishers know in advance that the public will buy whatever the publishers choose to sell, backed up by a slew of “reviewers” owned lock-stock by the same conglomerates, therefore would not dare write something negative about the stream of trash that comes from NY publishers.
BUT THEN CAME THE INTERNET and all of the above is crumbling. Now anyone can set up his own website and promote his own books and market using AI, audio , and videos. It is no longer necessary for a writer to submit his work to ANY publisher, including Equus Publishing. Of course, I am still happy to assist talented writers in any way I can, and there is still the issue of de-conditioning the public at large, which is something like deprogramming a religious believer, and making them aware that the best books are no longer being produced by the NY publishing monopoly, but are to be found in small independent outfits like Equus.