Arts & Culture
Save a Writer–Buy a Book
By Haim Watzman / November 26, 2008
"It’s a very ugly time in American publishing," my agent wrote to me. I had just received my semiannual statement from my publisher, which informed me that a total of 716 paperback copies of my first book, Company C were sold in the year after that edition came out. I never had high expectations, but only 716?
People in the book business are notoriously downbeat, but my poor agent sounded even more depressed than usual. No doubt he’s reeling from the news that a major trade publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has announced an indefinite moratorium on the acquisition of new manuscripts.
Taken together, my statement and this week’s book industry news indeed confirm my talent (inherited from a long line of ancestors) for having chosen to be in the worst business at the worst possible time. The two things that a writer needs most-readers and publishers-seem to be going the way of the woolly mammoth and the trilobite.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has stopped acquiring manuscripts because the company’s in big-time debt–even more than me. So I understand that. But why don’t I have more readers? I mean, I walk around Jerusalem and see lots of tourists and Birthrighters and students, and on my blog and a thousand others readers debate the Israel-Arab conflict, and hundreds of Jewish-American teenagers fantasize about being IDF heroes. And only 700 of these people have gone to the trouble of purchasing an inexpensive memoir about service in the Israeli army?
With so few readers and publishers, how am I ever going to complete and publish the novel I’ve been working on for the last two years?
Numbers aren’t the only problem when it comes to readers. Those of us who have literary ambitions also want high-quality readers. What Do Jewish-American Writers Need (and I Mean Really Need)? asks Sanford Pinsker over on Jbooks.com. They need great readers, he answers. Without readers willing to delve into books that challenge them, he writes, writers will not write and publishers will not publish. That is, lots of readers. More than 716 of them.
Writers have a soft need and a hard need. The soft need is for recognition and appreciation, which gives you the motivation to keep slaving away. The hard need is for money too feed ourselves and our families while we engage in the most inefficient process known to humankind, investing huge amounts of time in the most uncertain pursuit ever invented. Most of us will never sell enough books to make a profit; we’ll never be bestselling novelists like Jonathan Safran Foer, Chaim Potok, and Leon Uris. All we ask is to sell enough copies to give us the feeling that we’ve got a decent audience, and enough to maintain our publishers’ delusion that we still have enough potential to be worth another chance.
But Pinsker offers little encouragement. "As a conservative guess, I figure it will take another 500 years to produce a literary giant such as Saul Bellow, and it will take at least that long to create a readership that recognizes, and enjoys, novels with complexity and texture," he writes.
Five hundred years! That’s deep time. Much longer than the longest time I’ve ever waited, which is at the checkout line at the supermarket down the street from my apartment.
So it’s great that you read my blog, but buy my books, too. I promise you a good read-and you might just help save Jewish literature. And the publishing industry. And me.
Cross-posted at South Jerusalem.
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Reeeeeeead Taaania’s boook, it’s goooooood and she’s proooomising. Â
Well, failing that, read her book-tour posts, because she writes intelligently about fiction. Â Â
Tania, if there’s a silver lining to the economic destructo-machine in the US, it’s that the media corporations posing as publishers are having serious trouble, and fewer people will take out $60K in student loans for an MFA. Â My hope is that this will lead to a rebirth of actual writing and publishing done because people want to do it, not because they expect real money out of it. Â Sounds callous, maybe, but I’m a big fan of actual writers and actual publishers.
Frances, thank you so much for visiting my site and reading one of my stories. I am checking out what CD-Baby is, never heard of it. But I have set up a website, The Short Review, which reviews short story collections and anthologies. Maybe I can pick up some tips!
The person who creates an on-line CD-Baby-type distribution network for short fiction is the person who makes a fortune and brings wealth to writers and translators. Tania, I read your website and your stuff looks compelling. Very excited to know about your work, which I hope to read right after Haim’s. Your story Plaits expresses the core dilemma perfectly. The outside world has its demands too. Personally, I think it’s both more useful and more fun to view our books as an entrance ticket to the throbbing heart of the world instead of a postcard from its edge. Apparently, the world needs our fuller, more embodied participation.
Houghton-Mifflin drowns while vampire novellas thrive. One publisher of pulpy teen supernatural fiction is doing so well they just gave all of their authors a bonus.
No, I’m not one of them. But I’m considering converting. The synagogue of Beth-Intellectual has a hard time getting a minyan, and thousands of cute little teenage hearts thumping hard while moistening frilly pink underthings is pretty difficult to ignore at congregation Dumb-But-Horny across the street.
So, perhaps poverty is the new cost of immortality? Don’t despair. There’s always non-fiction. Only takes six months to write, and you can plug your novels on the dustjacket!
Haim,
as an Israel-based writer who is in a similar position, only perhaps worse off because my book is (wait for it..) a short story collection (The White Road and Other Stories), I hear you loud and clear. I am also being told to "bring to this enterprise that same appetite for adventure and creativity" with which I wrote the book. It is not easy for me, I would rather sit alone with my computer in a small room, in the fictional worlds I create, but at the same time it doesn’t make sense that I have put so much into this book and I am now going to abandon it and hope that someone reads it. 716 buyers for a short story collection would exceed all expectations.
I am currently in the middle of a Virtual Book Tour, being interviewed on 11 blogs around the world over 11 weeks. It is exhausting, I am not great at talking about myself, but my publishers, a small press, suggested it, and I thought, well, I live in Israel, pretty far from my target readership, I should do as much online marketing as I can. It’s fun, so far!
So, basically, everyone here is correct: it’s about marketing and about hype, writers should be as creative about getting their books out there as they are about writing them, and it is very difficult, time-consuming and expensive. I have no easy answers, I just wanted to offer my own story. I look forward to reading your book.
Frances — You are correct, of course, that a writer has to make an effort to reach his audience. Having arranged two speaking tours of the U.S. for myself, I can tell you, however, that the investment of time and money this requires is huge, almost prohibitive, for a freelance writer without independent means who lives overseas. Thanks for the encouragement, though!Â
Haim Watzman
South Jerusalem
Turn it around, Haim. Bring to this enterprise that same appetite for adventure and creativity that led you to make aliyah and landed you in the IDF in the first place. Challenge yourself to unearth the audience for your own book. I promise you there’s a readership out there, but it’s your job to go find it and cultivate it. Tour US military bases, take it to ROTC programs, contact groups interested in masculinity and formation of maleness. I’m sure there are many other avenues. In my experience, people generally respond positively to commitment and boldness. I haven’t reaad your book yet so I’m not sure what further specifically to suggest. But this is the work ahead of you. Interrogate your own book as you did your participation in the military, the insights are there awaiting you. And have a ball doing it. Otherwise, what’s the point? I’m sure you didn’t write Company C to end up begging for a few paltry readers on Jewcy. And report back so we can follow and relish in your progress. If you feel you need salvation, save yourself, Haim. It’s absolutely within your own power. Save yourself. We’ll be rooting for you!
I had read that Pinsker essay last week, and made my Jewish American Fiction class read it as well, and it sparked quite a debate. Pinsker says in relation to great new writers like Adam Mansbach and Ehud Havazelet: "What they need are readers, and that depends, among other things, on a more enlightened cultural climate." And while he is, in a sense, right, he’s also wrong. It’s still all about marketing, sadly enough. As long as people with MBAs own publishing houses and tell us what we should be reading (Safran-Foer), people like Havazelet, whose work is far more sophisticated than Safran-Foer’s, are not going to be read.
 I know this for a fact, because I taught a Jewish American Fiction course at UCLA this fall, and put Havazelet’s newest book Bearing the Body (2007) on the syllabus, which meant that 65 students had to go out and buy a brand new book. Nearly every student fell in love with the book, and this had less to do with a "more enlightened cultural climate" than it did with the sheer fact of a professor putting it on the syllabus. It’s still, sadly, all about exposure…
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