Theme Essay by Jenny Bent
An Agent's View of How the Publishing Industry Is Changing
A couple of years ago, I had lunch with an old friend, someone I think of as both intelligent and savvy. He's the publisher of a largish imprint at a major house, and I run my own literary agency. We're used to disagreeing, and that day we disagreed about what will happen as e-books become more popular.
He thought readers would always need the big publishing houses, because readers need to have their content filtered—that we agents, editors, and publishers have a certain kind of literary taste or standard that should be passed along to the reader.
Well—as I told him then—blech.
I've always found this kind of thinking elitist and unnecessary. And as the publishing climate continues to change, I like to think he's been proven wrong.
Some authors need publishing houses, of course. Publishers are often better at marketing, publicity, and distribution than any individual author can be. Increasingly, this is not the case, although even Amanda Hocking, who famously made close to $2 million with her self-published e-books in 2010, decided to go the traditional route in 2011 by signing a contract with St. Martin's Press.
Right now, however, I'm somewhat gleefully celebrating the fact that electronic publishing is blowing apart the idea that we in publishing have better taste than the average reader.
Why would this be so? Because some of us have Ivy League educations? Because we live in New York City and are therefore more sophisticated and urbane than most readers? Because we read the Paris Review and the New Yorker? Because we have chic haircuts and ironic sideburns and wear trendy little eyeglasses? (Full disclosure: I do not have ironic sideburns.)
What I love most about successful independently published e-books is that many of them didn't pass the gatekeeper test. The individual authors tried and failed to get an agent or publisher, then decided to do it themselves. With e-publishing, it's easier than ever to get books out there, and the list of successfully self-published e-book authors grows every day. Like Hocking, lots of these authors are now getting lucrative book deals as publishers struggle to catch up. And many of them are turning down agents and publishers because they want to keep doing it on their own terms.
This has always happened to a certain extent. My client Laurie Notaro self-published years ago, because she couldn't find a publisher after seven years of trying. When she did get a publishing deal at long last—with Random House for The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club, Notaro’s 2002 collection of humor columns from the Arizona Republic—her book debuted at #12 on the New York Times Bestseller list.
The Shack was self-published. This Christian novel by the unknown William P. Young shot to #1 on the Times paperback fiction list in 2008 and likely sold more than a million copies. (Hachette later picked it up for commercial publication.) In the early '90s, Richard Paul Evans's first book—The Christmas Box—was self-published. (Evans is now a bestselling Simon & Schuster author.)
Maybe I'm just bitter. An agent friend and I recently emailed each other about "reader taste" versus "publisher taste." Many of the books I've really loved, I've had a tough time selling to publishers or sold for very little money. Yet, most of them have done very well indeed. I knew readers would love them, but publishers often waffled, apparently because they didn't believe readers would want books that were "quiet" or not "high concept" or just plain quirky and tough to categorize.
I don't want to be too hard on editors and publishers. We agents, too, are part of the same cycle, as we pitch books that we believe the big houses want.
We're all doing our best, and publishing will always be a gamble. But except for Harlequin, most of us can't really afford to do market research; we rely on guesswork to make pretty major decisions about what to pitch, publish, or promote.
When publishers "run numbers" to decide how much money they can spend on a book, a big part of the process comes down to comparing the book to another that's similar and then factoring in the sales figures of said book. Sound unscientific? You betcha. But in many cases, they don't have much more to go on—and with so little to go on, publishers really do have to rely on marketing hooks in their decision-making.
Still, what I dislike about publishing is not so much the way publishers, editors, and agents make decisions but the attitude that sometimes affects those decisions. It's that patronizing, East Coast, urban attitude of knowing better than the rest of book-reading America. It's the assumption that a book must appeal to a certain kind of sophisticated East Coast reader to be successful.
Readers respond to sincerity, to emotional truth, not to hooks. And when a "quiet" book takes off because readers love it, it's fun to gloat—as well as to note that some mainstream publishers do remember that people outside New York actually read books.
Take Amy Einhorn of Amy Einhorn Books. You may have heard of a little novel called The Help? It's not a high-concept book at all. But Amy fell in love with it, published it, and the rest is history. It was the first book she bought at her new imprint at Penguin USA. We had lunch before it published, and I remember Amy telling me how excited she was about it.
So I can't help feeling gleeful about the democratization of the process. Hooray for you writers who believe in yourselves enough to get your work out there by whatever means necessary. Hooray for your successes, hooray for your bravery, and hooray for the fact that every book you sell means you may be touching a reader's life in a powerful way.
Art Information
- “Drinks” © Rick Audet; Creative Commons license
- “Diner 2″ © Seemann; stock photo
Jenny Bent has worked in publishing for over fifteen years, both as an editor and an agent, most recently as vice president at Trident Media Group before founding The Bent Agency in 2009. There she has continued her tradition of representing bestsellers, with over fifteen titles on the NYT list since she opened her doors.
The agency recently expanded to include an in-house foreign rights agent and a children's book agent. See The Bent Agency website for more information.
This piece originally appeared in a different form as "Think of Me as a Conduit, Not a Gatekeeper" on Jenny's blog Bent on Books, April 6, 2011.
