False Preferences and Real Coin

Yesterday, while I was gone* Pam Uphoff posted a very interesting question over at Mad Genius Club.

It is a topic that has been treated before** but one that I feel is so, pardon the term, “mind blowing” that I, myself, keep having little shocks when I turn to do something that has been part of my life forever.

Pam’s question was something like “Should I just write my idea as it comes to me [no, you never should. IMHO you should use your conscious mind to shape your subconscious impulses. BUT that might just be me] or should I tailor it to what is selling well now?”

This is as old a question as “should I be a plotter or a pantser”? Almost every conference I’ve spoken at, I’ve got the question “Should I write what want to, or what will sell?”

And at almost every conference, I’ve given the same answer, “Write what you want, but be aware that if what you want to write is what is selling madly right now, the publishers will probably be full up on it by the time your novel even hits their desk.”

However, as with plotter and pantser, I have to say this is a question without a real answer. My answer could be and often was contradicted by others: authors, publishers, agents – people who’d made big sales or bought “big books” by going with what was trendy; by shaping their work to what they thought would sell.

So, yesterday I looked at Pam’s question and prepared to answer, then had one of those moments, like the ones that we often write about but rarely see, you know “it was as though the sky and the Earth had been swept away, leaving behind a landscape that xyz didn’t recognize, a new world in which he was completely ignorant of what to do.”

I’ve been in this business for over ten years, and I’ve been successful for a certain measure of successful. No, I haven’t become incredibly rich. But I’ve sold over twenty books, which means I must be doing something right. So, I know how to do it, right?

Well, yes. I know PERFECTLY WELL how to sell to publishers as they existed ten years ago.

And there is the rub. I looked over my writing how-to shelf, and most of them are designed to teach you to write the book that will stand out to publishers – the book publishers will like and take out of the slush pile and/or the midlist hell, and promote the heck out of. They say things like “make sure you have a social point” – only usually they say it more subtly – and “use important people as characters or tie to big events” and… stuff like that. They might also give you advise on how best to fit a subgenre that’s selling. No, I confess I don’t own something called “How to write the perfect urban fantasy” which should surprise no one who has read my Shifters’ series.

These books were good – and good advice – on how to write to get the publishers to notice you and promote you.

But here’s the problem, children – even if you’re not intending to go totally indie (I’m not, for one, because I don’t know when the music is stopping in this game of musical chairs, so I like to have a foot in each chair. So to put it. For the purpose of this metaphor I am, of course, an octopus.) you (and I) can have no idea if that publisher you are targeting will even BE there in the next year or two. Hell, even if he is there, you don’t know how he’ll be acting and/or what he’ll be buying. Worse, you don’t know if that heart’s blood book you just turned in (uh. Good title) will ever see the light of day or disappear into legal hell in a publisher’s bankruptcy.

So it would seem the safer thing would be to write what you think will sell to the PUBLIC, only no one knows what that is. No, not even the traditional publishers. Or particularly NOT the traditional publishers.

Yes, they did market research. But their market research was as distorted as ours. They were, of necessity, researching what bookstores would stock and what book reps would get enthusiastic about. (Part of the reason all promotion went to bestsellers, which is counterintuitive.)

And all of this, the publishers and the distributors and even to an extent the bookstores were getting their opinions distorted by something that Timur Kuran calls Preference Falsification in his Private Truths Public Lies.

Yes, the book deals mostly with tyrannical politics and how it creates that, but any regime enforced from the top and running without check, even if it’s a regime that engenders only “prestige” or “social approbation” creates that to some extent.

And when you’re talking about the publishing system, it is a system that tied money to prestige and social approbation. I’ve covered before how the feedback loop on sales numbers got vitiated by a virtual monopoly on what got on the shelves, and the readers of course not buying what they didn’t even know exists. The sales numbers, ultimately, didn’t act as a check on anyone’s career in publishing. (Well, the author’s, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.) So the route to be appreciated and promoted was to publish books your colleagues – most of them fairly insular by upbringing, education and residence (literally insular) – approved of and considered “hot.”

That this had buggerall to do with what Joe and Jane six pack was obvious, both from the fact that stocking in distribution centers often covered three very different states in the same exact books, and from the fact that we got told “they just don’t read” – and by and large, more and more, this was true as they couldn’t find anything they wanted to read.

Meanwhile, the people these publishers socialized with, or those who wrote reviews, were usually driven by the same values system and wanted to stand out as “smart” or “sharp” or “concerned” or “aware” or whatever it was that was hot at that time. So, the echo chamber told the publishers and editors exactly what they wanted to hear. (Excepting Baen where people, in the bar, felt comfortable enough to gripe and bitch.)

So I look over my shelves, on stuff like “make your romance stand out by treating the injustices of the Regency seriously” and I think “why?” No, seriously, why? The injustices of the regency, including child labor and a strict class system have nothing to do with our current life. Worse, they’re not even vaguely controversial. Of course I’m not saying you should be non-historical in something like that. Or that you should enthusiastically approve of the conditions. I’m saying your main character doesn’t need to be a crusader against poverty. And while it’s normal to make noises in the regency romances about the iniquitous treatment of women, I treat it as duck speak and pass over it. No women in the regency would TALK like that. No matter how they felt. Or if they did, they were so few and far between that it gets REALLY tiring to find them in every book. Ditto social reformers. Remember the kind-hearted people who ran orphanages raised the kids to go into service at twelve or thirteen. And meanwhile, they often worked. To have orphanages where they learn Greek and Latin or worse “just get time to play” is so a-historical as to make me spit out my coffee. Letting alone that it would be an unkindness in those days, preparing the kids for a world that wouldn’t exist for another hundred and fifty years.

Does your reader know and care about this? I don’t know. (Younger ones won’t, and will think the world was always a place where “crusading” for “these obvious goods” was rewarded. I will just quote Leonard Cohen here: “You shouldn’t lie. Not to the young.”) I know that Georgette Heyer doesn’t do any of this and is a perennial bestseller. As are others from before the publishing/bookstore shelves hegemony took hold. Most of them are despised by the current system as either preposterous or “fluffy” and yet they STILL sell. Agatha Christie and Heinlein come to mind.

The thing is, though, that times HAVE changed since those people were popular. And the reading public has changed too. My kids find Heyer’s too authentic regency speech difficult. For that matter, I now find Dragon Riders of Pern – much more recent – reads as a “dated style” in the era of internet posts (which are usually MUCH shorter than mine {G}) and tech-speak.

So – where do we go from here? No clue my friends. The road is as unknown to me as to you. Worse, it’s dark and we can’t see whether it winds through a forest or runs off a cliff. And it’s quite likely – in fact, I can practically promise you – there are rodents of unusual size ahead and that things don’t mean what we think they mean.

Fortunately, I have a couple of flashlights I found. I don’t know how much good they’ll be, but they might help us find our feet. That one I just handed you is called “what worked before.” Yes, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Heinlein, Simak, Anderson, Heyer, even Austen. Followed judiciously, in trend if not in style, it will show you where there’s firm ground to step on. This other one is called “what I want to write” which is often what one wishes someone would write.

We proceed cautiously, as the ground reveals itself. There’s gold in them there hills. We just need to create a road to them. It’s a little scarier, but far more exciting than what we had before.

Let’s forge forward into the new Earth and the new Sky.

*(I’m sorry I missed yesterday, particularly since it was my day at Mad Genius Club and I take my commitments very seriously. In passing, it was the worst possible day for this to happen, since it was my husband’s birthday and since I’d planned to go to officeish. I did go, but it caused a major disruption before I got there, and got me all out of sync, which meant I was making birthday lemon meringue birthday pie [can’t buy it. They don’t sell low carb that works for us] at five pm. Also, in passing, thank you to Amanda Green. Greater love has no woman than she who is awakened at seven am by an hysterical writer – who was at the same time trying to dress for officeish – screaming she can’t get into her blog, and can Amanda do SOMETHING. And then takes instruction and does it. AND forebears to post something like “Got called by crazy b*tch who sounded like her head was on fire.” Thank you, my friend. I owe you one.)

**http://kriswrites.com/2011/07/13/the-business-rusch-popcorn-kittens/