Written for KC Generations, Kansas City, Missouri
“The whole culture grapples with who is in charge and what can be known, who must be listened to and what must be remembered. As authors, authors sense acutely the complicated relationship they have with authority. ‘Author’ and ‘authority’ – it goes beyond the mere suffix following the word. In the classroom or out of it, what one speaks, what one writes is always seeking a purchase, looking for traction, hoping this word will take.”
Michael Martone, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art, 2005
Literature and the world of ideas revolve around authors taking chances, and making efforts to put words together to form a meaningful message or a story that will inspire readers. The job of the author is not easy, and it takes a very special individual to make their living at writing anything. I knew a writing teacher once from Connecticut who always used to say, “cut and trim, cut and trim, write with vigor and with vim.” He was a pragmatic mentor to housewives and schoolteachers who longed to write books for children. He kept up correspondence with his students, and I remember he was sometimes merciless in his criticism. I remember his telling me about the never-ending quest for the right word would have his students chomping at the bit, struggling for just the right turn of phrase, and to do this you literally needed to get down on your hands and knees and “bite the rug.” From the perspective of a book salesman, I can tell you the market for children’s books is one of the most cutthroat of all. I would never dream of publishing a children’s book, no matter how polished or cute it was. Children’s booksellers, librarians and book reviewers view themselves as a kind of guardians-of-the-gate for children’s literature, and the smallest mistake or problem with the format or content will spell instant doom for a children’s project. And this not only counts for small publishers’ books. Big publishers can get caught in this bear trap as well.
The struggle that authors go through to create their books is legendary, but I have seen the process from the other side, from a couple of different sides in fact. As a book salesman, you have something like 15 to 30 seconds to present a book to a bookstore buyer. Booksellers need to make swift judgments in the interests of time and economy. The thing that makes my sales job interesting is that booksellers can be very engaging people, and the books always change with each selling season. You never have the time to read all the books you sell, so you become adapt at coming up with a sales handle, a pitch, if you like, to say about each title. Never mind that an author could have poured blood, sweat and tears into creating the book, which may or may not be a masterpiece, and a key way it’s going to get on the shelf at Borders or Rainy Day Books is if the stars are aligned right and the business gods smile down on the transaction.
And the process does not end there. If books do not sell, or if nobody checks it out at the local library, they can be returned to the publisher for credit against future purchases. That’s why a standard publishing agreement for authors states that royalties will be paid only on “books sold, paid-for and not returned.” The whole business of returns is sad and awkward for everybody in the book business. You can have a big bestseller that garners a goldmine of publicity and exposure, and the publisher will gleefully print and re-print copies of the book. At the end of line, though, they risk their book not becoming a perennial seller and they can become awash in a sea of returns. This peculiar predicament has affected publishers both large and small. The process starts with the author and their private writing space, and once it goes out into the marketplace it can be ignored, marginalized or scorned. If the book catches on, the publisher needs to play their cards right not to end up with too many books. There is an annual overstock and remainder book show in Chicago every year in the fall where publishers unload their wares. One wit called it “the show where turkeys fly!” The residual market for unsold books pours into the Internet as well where, if you are willing to pay shipping, you can sometimes buy some books for as little as a penny a piece.
It seems that in the 21st century the book itself is becoming supplanted by the computer screen. The e-book has been slow to catch on, but it has never really gone away, and now there are big flashy ads in glossy magazines and marquees for electronic readers from corporations like Microsoft and Sony. These newly updated devises can hold an entire library in its clutches, and readers can even manipulate the text and interact with it. This file-sharing phenomenon changed the face of the music business. I remember walking into a Starbucks where they were playing Theodius Monk and I had a conversation with the young clerk who expressed a passionate love for the music. I told him about pianist Wynton Kelly and bassist Paul Chambers, classic jazz, and he eagerly wrote it down and said he was going straight home to download it onto his computer. Technology changed the face of that transaction, no money changed hands, and it gives me pause to think about what could happen to the content of books in the future.
I hope I am not come across as pessimistic in this article. In fact I am a kind of cockeyed optimist when it comes to books and the state of literature today. As a book salesman I’ve made the jump to publishing my own books. My parents are 81 years old and they still come into the office everyday and run Academy Chicago Publishers, a small but fiercely independent house that has published books of general interest for the past 31 years. You could say that publishing books is hereditary, and that I got the idea to do my own books by observing the ups and downs of my parent’s company. In a way this is true, but I also saw selling and marketing books as a way to do my own thing. I came up with my ideas for books through my job as an independent book salesman for the past 25 years, and from helping Academy Chicago Publishers develop its own list of books. I started my publishing company, Wicker Park Press, in 2002, and while I made many mistakes as a rookie publisher, I have learned by example and through experience. I have seen the fortunes of many books play out in the marketplace from manuscript to finished product. I feel blessed that I can contribute to the greater culture by helping publishers distribute their books, and that I have the opportunity to participate in my own form of self-expression with Wicker Park Press. Writers have their inspiration and their muse that motivates them to sit down and write books, publishers have their own special brand of incentive that keeps them producing books, and the whole shebang can be a fascinating journey for those involved in the world of books.
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