Want to get published? Then get real

Two recent events have set a bee a-buzz in my publisher’s bonnet.
The first was was a chat with an organiser of one of the literary festivals that abound in the region; the second was an email from a friend and would-be book author about a writing course she had invested in. They had one startling fact in common: neither had any connection with the cold commercial reality of producing and selling books.
My shady past and part-time present as a hack and author gives me an unfair advantage over those who think no publisher truly understands the soul of a writer. They can get quite umpty when I reveal my soulful existence as one of their number, despite the recent injection of commercialism: they clearly think I have gone to the bad for wanting to bring grubby cash in to the equation, so these conversations tend to be quite short.
The festival organiser is a chum of long-standing, and as well as sitting round a large committee table dreaming up excitements for next year’s festival, she runs creative writing and poetry classes, and a popular writing website. What she hasn’t done is to get her work published beyond some stories in The People’s Friend. Her enthusiasm is infectious and undimmed, but she lives in the warm fuzzy world of the hobby writer with dreams but no real prospects of earning a living from books.
Nothing wrong with that at all. I amuse myself when I go off to Transylvania by digging out my crime novel and writing another chapter or two. I know perfectly well that it’s unlikely to get published, mostly because I’ll never finish it; and that if some fool of a publisher took it on it would soon languish in an unpromoted heap of remaindered copies. But it’s fun, and fills the long quiet Carpathian evenings.
Back to the festival organiser. There was nothing in this year’s festival line-up that related to publishing: the process, the market, the business model, the nitty-gritty of production. Nor was there a hint of the bookselling world; perhaps none of those at the conference had any interest in actually selling a book. Maybe the Creative Art is enough to feed their literary souls.
Same thing with the woman on the writing course. Lots of great stuff on pace, dialogue, character, et al. They were showing, not telling, and making flow charts of the plot for all they were worth. But not a sniff of how the relationship between author and publisher works; nothing to hint at the damaging bitchiness of editors and agents, or the philistine demands of the bean-counters.
If, that is, you ever get to meet a real live publisher. The book industry is morphing into a very different life form, and every part of the chain is affected. Authors who don’t understand what’s going on and how they have to adapt to survive, won’t get on to book shelves, not even via self-publishing. The DIY option is a Morecambe beach of the book world: get it right and you can do very well; choose the wrong path and it’s a slow, painfully expensive, and inevitable doom.
The frustration is that there is so much free help out there, in bookshops and on the internet; for a few hours’ surfing, or £20 in Waterstones, wannabe authors could get some seriously valuable advice to take them to within spitting distance of a book deal. But although they claim to be desperate to get published, they won’t make that small effort.
Book on to another course for wannabes, dearie, and don’t bother those of us who are trying to earn a living.