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Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo and Blair
A few weeks ago I spoke to a university class called Introduction to Publishing. I talked assertively, right out loud from behind a low table, just as though I believed this industry to be in any way controllable or predictable. Worse, I was asked to speak about the role of the Acquiring Editor — me, a rebellious East Texan who has entered that emotional, blind-faith process primarily in the context of two independent houses and for a chord of intervening years within the hallways of a conglomerated trade publisher.
(I’ve had a few other affiliations, too. Thinking on all this reminds me that when we announced the onrush of Unbridled Books four years ago, Michael Cader made quick reference to our “peripatetic careers.” Onward, as Speer says.)
Through most of that classroom hour, it was clear that the instructor was worried she’d have to undo everything I was about to tell these kids. It all started with this assertion: “An acquiring editor’s role is to increase the assets of the publishing house specifically by decreasing the gamble that publishing inevitably and by its very nature always is.”
But that’s right, I think, that — once you set aside Harry Potter and the Brand Name Authors — fiction publishing is like nothing so much as a beautiful gamble. It’s a wager we place on the cultural good, with the same blind faith in ourselves, in karma and the odds, and the same warm belief in the imperative of “being due” that are enjoyed by the most inveterate gamblers.
And it’s true isn’t it, that shaving the gamble is why most of the fiction marketing and publicity dollars in this industry go to those very few sure things, that handful of branded names?
Every other success we all share in is a bald surprise. Isn’t it? Should I begin to name the recent infeasibles within the system? No. Enough said. But, as rare as it is, especially in fiction publishing, the commercial and critical winner can be sufficient to carry a small company for years.
As a result, independent fiction publishing is nerve-wracking, springing hopeful, and righteous all at once. I hope that doesn’t make folks like us personally unbearable. It’s taught me one thing (at least): that although you can’t foresee the outcome of the roll — although you can’t cause the success of a new novel no matter how much you love, admire, and are proud of publishing it — if you persist in building the list entire on the texts themselves, on each individual good book, and not on a sequence of guesses about what readers might want right now, then you just might win the roll just often enough.
In good faith,
Fred Ramey
posted 4/23/07
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<<< as the swallow
>>> M’aidez
Labor too causes backpain. That prof must need some tylenol!
— Brian Hadd · 04/24/07 05:04 PM · #