Say Yes to … MARKET FORCES, Damn It All.

Sep 15, 2011 22:02

I cherish - perhaps in the way in which people are sometimes described as ‘hugging their hurts to themselves’, although I’ve dined out on the story for years - the memory of a (Yank, naturally) agent in (naturally) California who - this must be a decade and more by now - having heard that a screenplay of mine had won a juried award at an international film festival, wrote and all but begged that I send it on to (naturally) her, with an eye to her taking me on. She was by all accounts reputable; so I did just that.

Within the month, I had received a letter of rather more than common or garden abusiveness, decrying and denouncing my manifold and manifest sins against the gods of diversity and attributing to me a misogyny far beyond the very slight and, as it were, orientational misogyny that - let us be honest - every gay man feels by nature (and which most, being politically indoctrinated, deny, whilst the rest of us, being polite, merely conceal it). How dare I send such a Vicious Creation to a Proudly Feminist Agency? I contented myself with observing in my reply that I’d never heard of her beforehand, had not been the one to seek her out, and, in light of our late correspondence, wouldn’t and shouldn’t have her represent me on a bet.

I find both the agent’s account of the latest kerfuffle and that of the injur’d authors plausible and credible (and quite possibly equally accurate and exemplary of a Great Misunderstanding Which Might with Goodwill Have Been Sorted But Has Now Been Made Irreparable by Whinge). Of course, so far as one can tell, all the actors in the Say-Yes-to-Gay-YA (wait for it) drama are Americans, and I don’t pretend to understand all the inwardness involved. What I have seen as this tiresome business has slopped over onto LJ is that the authors, inadvertently, simply by putting their side of the dispute, have invoked Nemesis, with the Kindly Ones in her train.

I refer, of course, to commenters.

Every smugly self-righteous Grauniad-ista twunt (but I repeat myself) seems to have put in her tuppence, essentially consisting of variations upon that very odd American response ‘WORD’. This is the problem with what passes, falsely, under the name of ‘diversity’ in these thin and piping times: for it has been … perverted … to mean, A Visually and Visibly Differentiated Group of Persons of Varying Skin Colours, Sexes, Religion, Orientation, and Disability, All of Whom Think The Same Bloody Thing About Every Sodding Issue.

Balls to that. (Ed, in fact. And Yvette as well. This sort of thing is precisely what’s wrong with Labour.)

Now, look here, damn it all. I’m a card-carrying pouf. Not to be indelicate, I’ve been on my knees and/or on my back for more Likely Lads than you lot have had hot dinners. And do you know what I loathe, despise, and detest more than any other form of ZOMGOppreshun from others outwith the ‘family’? Self-nominated allies and Group-Think LGBLT-Sandwich Thought Police, those Tesco Torquemadas who insist that I am to think with my bits, not my wits, and that because I like it up the bum I am required to hold certain opinions.

Right, that lot can sod right off.

The first lesson appointed for the day is from the Epistle of Dr Johnson:

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

The second, from the Psalms of George Gissing, commonly called those of Henry Ryecroft:

And why should any man who writes, even if he write things immortal, nurse anger at the world’s neglect?  Who asked him to publish?  Who promised him a hearing?  Who has broken faith with him?  If my shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots, and I, in some mood of cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the man has just cause of complaint.  But your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?  If it is honest journeywork, yet lacks purchasers, at most you may call yourself a hapless tradesman.  If it come from on high, with what decency do you fret and fume because it is not paid for in heavy cash?  For the work of man’s mind there is one test, and one alone, the judgement of generations yet unborn.  If you have written a great book, the world to come will know of it.  But you don’t care for posthumous glory.  You want to enjoy fame in a comfortable armchair.  Ah, that is quite another thing.  Have the courage of your desire.  Admit yourself a merchant, and protest to gods and men that the merchandise you offer is of better quality than much which sells for a high price.  You may be right, and indeed it is hard upon you that Fashion does not turn to your stall.

Now, it may well be that the agent - or by some accounts, several agents - were actuated by malignity in turning the MS down or giving it a conditional acceptance, upon conditions the authors refused. Or, again, it may not. The point is, actually, immaterial.

Publishing is a business. Agents and publishers alike are engaged in trying to divine the moods of the market. Perhaps they have guessed wrongly here; it does happen. After all, Tollers and La Rowling both had to shop their first books about before someone took a flyer on them.

But with self- - not vanity - publishing, print on demand, e-books, and the Internet, we are nowadays back in something like Johnson’s world, when men ‘sent what [they] wrote to the press, and let it take its chance’, as the Great Lexicographer himself put it: so there’s one option. And of course, there’s the further option of keeping shtum, not making accusations against agents who’ve declined your MS, and continuing to flog the damned thing until it finds an agent and, it is then hoped, a buyer.

The point is this, and is quite simple, and has been wholly missed by the Unco’ Guid rallying in support of Persecuted Authordom. Until an agent has taken you on, her whole duty is to her agency, and that duty is not to take on and expend resources on placing a book that the publishers don’t want and the reading public shan’t buy. The publisher’s primary duty, for all the duties he may owe to an author whose work he has accepted, is to his shareholders, in maximising profit by not expending resources on books the reading public won’t purchase. And - I realise this comes as a simply horrid shock to many of you lot - the reading public owes the author not duty whatsoever.

If an author is absolutely determined that her work is Heaven-sent and just what the Great British Public (and whatever foreigners actually read books) wants, and mustn’t be changed by a jot or by a tittle, her recourses are simple. Form her own imprint, e-publish, or keeping knocking on the doors of agents. And, yes, there’s nothing wrong with drumming up a base of potential readers who’ll buy the bloody thing, not for its merits, but to Make a Political Point, if you think that’s enough to suggest to agent and publisher that there’s demand for it sufficient to justify bringing it to market.

But when I look at the sheer unexampled idiocy of almost all of the comments - note that almost - to the Great Post of Authorial Whinge, what I see is an almost universal incomprehension of market forces. If that lot wish actually to change the world (rather than stand about agreeing smugly with the likeminded and to burnish their Leftish, Islington-and-Notting-Hill Credentials), they want to get stuck in by writing politely to publishers and agents expressing a desire for more Gay YA fiction (and refraining from attributing evil motives to the present paucity of it on the shelf, if there is a paucity of it on the shelf) - and they want to back those fine sentiments and butter their damned parsnips by affirmatively purchasing only YA novels that meet their purity tests, starting book clubs for it, and all the rest. (It worked for that sod Gollancz, if only for a time: fancy not publishing Orwell because Orwell saw through Stalin!) The rest of it - the chorus of agreement and the unexamined premiss that agents and publishers are somehow required to take MSS that the public (those stupid little people; really, darling, so tiresome) don’t wish to buy, so long as those MSS tick the Indy-cum-Grauniad boxes - is simply political masturbation online.

My own conclusion thus far is that what YA wants - although what matters is what the market seeks - is less of this faux-‘diversity’ in which everyone looks different to one another but thinks exactly the same, and more books in which suburban Yank teenagers suddenly discover Austrian economics. Or at least books whereby their authors discover ’em.

I do realise that none of this is likely to penetrate the impermeable self-righteousness and self-satisfaction of the class of people that holds these inane views to begin with. Yet I can beseech them, after the manner of Noll Cromwell: at least think you that you might be mistaken, and that what has - if I have the term aright - bitch-slapped you is not an Eeeevil Conspiracy, but the Invisible Hand of the market, quite possibly deservingly.

And do stop whinging. It’s un-British, even if you haven’t the good fortune to be British.


writing, economics, essays, current events, press freedom, appalled & incredulous: follies exposed, publishing

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