Earlier this month, at the Publishing Industry’s annual BookExpo America, American author John Updike stated in a speech made to an assembly of publishers, booksellers and authors that “the written word was supposed to speak for itself and sell itself without author promotion.”
And while his speech garnered a standing ovation, it didn’t alleviate growing doubts within the industry that such sentiments were no longer viable. In fact growing concern that the industry is being hijacked by marketing techniques seen more often in commercial advertising for fast moving consumer goods, makes Updike’s comments more sentimental than factual.
While every writer no doubt dreams of the same level of success afforded J K Rowling with her Harry Potter series or Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, the reality remains that getting a book published in the current literary climate, particularly for a first time writer, is harder than breaking into Hollywood.
According to a recent report by the Book Industry Study Group, American publishers generated a net revenue of $34.6 billion in 2005, up 5.9 percent from the previous year, selling around 3.1 billion books. But projections for long-term growth remain uncertain at best, due to the simple fact that by and large, in our multimedia saturated world, potential book sales are limited because people increasingly don’t read as a form of entertainment anymore.
Over the past few years, the number of books published has soared even as sales fell. This changed however in 2005 as shown in a recent report by statisticians R.R. Bowker, who projected that the number of books released actually dropped last year to 172,000. The publishing industry as it exists today is a very different beast to even ten years ago, when a talented writer could submit a completed manuscript to eager publishers looking for ‘the next great novel.’
Nowadays we see at work the increasing influence of a new genre of professionals known as Book Packagers, who act as liaisons between publishing houses and everyone else involved in a book. This includes authors, artists, editors, photographers, researchers, indexers, and in some cases, even printers. Modern day publishing houses often don’t have enough in-house resources to handle all of the books they want to publish, so they out-source certain projects. These third parties, in addition to assembling the many components necessary for a finished book, are in many cases also responsible for hiring authors to actually write the manuscripts in the first place. In some instances the packagers pitch their own ideas to publishers, and in other cases, publishing companies hire packagers to develop projects they’ve originated, functioning as an amalgam of agent, editor, and publisher.
Book Packagers have become an integral part of the publishing industry, yet in many cases even major book distributors aren’t aware that the books they carry were created by companies other than the publishing houses.
Publishers have also become less likely to take a risk on an untried writer no matter how good the work on offer is. This has forced many authors to take drastic steps in terms of creating a carefully constructed and highly marketable literary persona that comes as part of a ready made package offered to publishers to enhance their appeal. A practise which has led many to ask if the publishing industry of this millennium is the new Hollywood where the marketability of the author’s persona as a commodity is of primary importance and the work itself trails a marked second?
Australian born writer DBC Pierre, the author of the Booker Prize winning novel Vernon God Little, a novel that the competition judges described as being: “A coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm but also our fascination with modern America,” is a perfect example of a shrewdly packaged and marketed ‘literary product’. In reality named Peter Finlay, Pierre used his true life story as a drug-addicted-con-man to create a bad boy persona that the marketing department of his publishing house eagerly seized upon and used to great effect in creating his enormous literary success.
Kaavya Viswanathan, the author of the ‘autobiographical’ novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, likewise caused a storm of controversy of a different kind in recent months when it was revealed that not only had she plagiarized the work of the best-selling young-adult author Megan McCafferty, but that far from being a work of genius from an untrained new talent, both she and her novel had been assiduously developed, marketed and promoted by a score of publishing industry workers way before it hit bookstore shelves.
The once iconic writer JT Leroy, described by Vanity Fair magazine as being “the brilliant, gifted, and profound fly on the wall” and who created an entire career around his supposed real persona and tales of life as an abused child turned drug addicted teen prostitute, was unveiled earlier this year to be as fictitious as the literary tales he created. In reality, s/he was the brain child of a middle aged American woman who created ‘J T’ with the aim of being as marketable as possible to potential publishers. One that garnered the writer not only lucrative publishing contracts but also the recent cinematic adaptation of one of her novels The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.
So too, James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, one of the best-selling books about drug addiction ever written and supported by such influential figures as Oprah Winfrey, (who, with her famous Book Club catapults often unknown writers to the best seller list) caused a media furore recently when it was revealed that much of his ‘real life’ story was in fact fiction of the highest calibre. Frey’s manuscript entered the market as a creation whose fate rode more on its packaging than on the artistic merits of its prose, perception, or plot, with the author peddling Pieces to publishers as a novel, and, when that didn’t work, he repackaged the text as a memoir in the hopes of capitalizing on the allure of confessional revelation.
In an interesting twist, Frey’s hardcover publisher, Doubleday, stood by Frey, stating in one press release that “recent accusations against [Frey] notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.”
Not everyone in the publishing industry is buying into the current trends however. The Literary Ventures Fund, for example, is one organization hoping to challenge the status quo of literary publishing by helping what it sees as being exceptional works of fiction, literary non-fiction and poetry find the readership they deserve by using an economic model. The process is classic venture capital – wherein books are viewed as individual enterprises that will directly benefit from special attention.
The company invests in books it believes to have both literary merit and commercial potential that might go unrealized without an added push. If its investment pays off, it will take a percentage of the book’s profits. If not, like any venture capitalist funding a high-tech start-up, it will swallow the loss.
So what do the old guard have to say about this? Well in the end even they are pragmatic about the bottom dollar. “I wish it was as simple as holding on to the older way of doing things,” said Daniel Menaker, executive editor-in-chief at the Random House Publishing Group. “This is a business that competes for hours and units sold against every other media format and we’re not making the type of growth that the stockholders, stock analysts and bookseller would like, but it’s going to grow.” Menaker is referring to financial growth of course not literary.
