A Thought from Shore Leave
An odd thing happened at last weekend’s Shore Leave convention, one that’s left me feeling I need to clarify something I said. I was on a panel on LGBT characters in SF, which - like many of the panels at this year’s Shore Leave - clearly involved some confusion among the panelists and audience as to what the panel was supposed to be about. The panelists included 4 authors and an editor from Tor, and at one point one of the authors - who had just written his first gay characters, though the book was not yet out - had expressed concern that he would lose some of his audience by including a gay relationship at the center of his story. (He came from, and had a strong readership among, a fairly conservative and religious community.) In responding to this, I said that there was one great advantage in being with a small press, as the author was, and that was that one did not need to meet the same sales numbers in order to be successful. Smaller houses were often able to pick up books that the NY houses weren’t able to buy, books that the larger publishers believed would not reach a large enough audience because of their content.
The Tor editor asked who I thought was putting pressure on the NY houses. I answered, “the parent corporations, the conglomerates that own the NY houses.” The Tor editor replied that he could certainly say that there was no pressure placed on the Tor editorial staff to buy anything but the best books they could find regardless of subject. I was considerably taken aback, and the acting moderator intervened.
And then I realized that we had been talking entirely at cross purposes. I had not said, and not meant to say, that the big NY houses don’t buy LGBT (or any other non-mainstream) books because the editors don’t want to buy them or are pressured not to buy them, though that was certainly what the editor heard. What I had meant to say, and what I thought I was saying, was that NY houses can’t afford to buy books that don’t reach a certain sales threshold. Smaller presses can afford to buy books with a niche audience, and "niche audience" often includes readers of LGBT books.
No malice is involved here, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that there is. But it is demonstrably true that the NY houses no longer buy midlist books - notice how many midlist authors who used to be with major NY houses are now either with small presses or self-publishing both back- and frontlist titles. There are hard sales numbers that books from the NY houses have to meet, those numbers are higher than books from smaller presses, and the old midlist titles, once the standby of the NY houses, no longer meet those criteria.
And I firmly believe that the inability to buy books that don’t make those numbers means that the NY houses have to buy books that they believe will resonate with a largely mainstream, demographically majority audience. Any book that deals with “minority” characters and issues of any kind, whatever they are, has to take the mainstream audience into account, and be appealing to that audience as well as to an audience already predisposed to read books about those subjects. A LGBT press (almost by definition small) can afford to sell primarily to an LGBT audience, and a specialty press can afford to sell primarily to readers who already know and love their subgenre: they don’t need to sell as many copies to make a profit. I will repeat, because I truly mean this: no prejudice or malice is involved here. But if a book seems unlikely to sell a certain (fairly high) number of copies in the first few months of its shelf life, the NY houses can’t buy it, no matter how well-written, important, or good it actually is. And many of the books that fall into that category are ones with non-mainstream viewpoints.
This is why I think that the proliferation of small, indie, and micro presses and the rise of self-publishing options is going to be good for the genre, and for authors in general. There is room in those worlds for books that have a different point of view, that don’t take the mainstream into account, and room, too, for books that take a while to find an audience, and for the sort of books that used to be called “cult classics,” the ones that attract a small but passionate readership. And that, I think, means more voices, and that is good for everyone.
The Tor editor asked who I thought was putting pressure on the NY houses. I answered, “the parent corporations, the conglomerates that own the NY houses.” The Tor editor replied that he could certainly say that there was no pressure placed on the Tor editorial staff to buy anything but the best books they could find regardless of subject. I was considerably taken aback, and the acting moderator intervened.
And then I realized that we had been talking entirely at cross purposes. I had not said, and not meant to say, that the big NY houses don’t buy LGBT (or any other non-mainstream) books because the editors don’t want to buy them or are pressured not to buy them, though that was certainly what the editor heard. What I had meant to say, and what I thought I was saying, was that NY houses can’t afford to buy books that don’t reach a certain sales threshold. Smaller presses can afford to buy books with a niche audience, and "niche audience" often includes readers of LGBT books.
No malice is involved here, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that there is. But it is demonstrably true that the NY houses no longer buy midlist books - notice how many midlist authors who used to be with major NY houses are now either with small presses or self-publishing both back- and frontlist titles. There are hard sales numbers that books from the NY houses have to meet, those numbers are higher than books from smaller presses, and the old midlist titles, once the standby of the NY houses, no longer meet those criteria.
And I firmly believe that the inability to buy books that don’t make those numbers means that the NY houses have to buy books that they believe will resonate with a largely mainstream, demographically majority audience. Any book that deals with “minority” characters and issues of any kind, whatever they are, has to take the mainstream audience into account, and be appealing to that audience as well as to an audience already predisposed to read books about those subjects. A LGBT press (almost by definition small) can afford to sell primarily to an LGBT audience, and a specialty press can afford to sell primarily to readers who already know and love their subgenre: they don’t need to sell as many copies to make a profit. I will repeat, because I truly mean this: no prejudice or malice is involved here. But if a book seems unlikely to sell a certain (fairly high) number of copies in the first few months of its shelf life, the NY houses can’t buy it, no matter how well-written, important, or good it actually is. And many of the books that fall into that category are ones with non-mainstream viewpoints.
This is why I think that the proliferation of small, indie, and micro presses and the rise of self-publishing options is going to be good for the genre, and for authors in general. There is room in those worlds for books that have a different point of view, that don’t take the mainstream into account, and room, too, for books that take a while to find an audience, and for the sort of books that used to be called “cult classics,” the ones that attract a small but passionate readership. And that, I think, means more voices, and that is good for everyone.