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Friday, September 23, 2011

Letter to a (not so) Young Author


Nearly four years ago, in the ancestor of this space, e.g. the first "incarnation" of Night Thoughts At Noon, I talked about how, at age 52, I had decided to hang up the idea of becoming a celebrity author, seeing as how there are no more such things as celebrity authors anyway, and regard my non-blog writing as a hobby rather than an obsession:  http://kelleyo.blogspot.com/search?q=Vanity+press

It's okay to be obsessed with a dream until you reach a certain age, say, 35. If you haven't gotten your foot on to the first rung of the Starlit Stairway by the time you're 35, you should probably subject yourself to some agonizing reappraisal.

Well, since I never did dream of movie or Broadway stardom, nor of becoming a rock star (well, okay, every male in my generation, myself included, has fantasized about being a rock star, but "fantasy" and "dream" are not the same thing. A dream is a wish your heart makes. A fantasy is just a wet dream. Anyone who can't distinguish between a genuine dream and a fantasy generally ends up on Thorazine) I cut myself a few extra years' slack. After all, Henry Miller was 43 when Tropic of Cancer saw print.


Me, in my dreams. (Up to age 35, that is. After age 35, I no
dreamed of being Tom Petty; I dreamed of owning him, as
in, "Yeah, I'm Tom Petty's manager. What's he worth to you?")

But I went past 43 and kept on going. If you follow the link above, you'll see that by age 52 I had decided that while dreaming is all well and good, it was unlikely that I was ever going to be in Scribners' stable of authors.

It's not that I'm not good enough. Of course I'm good enough. So are a lot of you. But you know the cliche: "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Cliche, sure. But as an author once said, "That cliches are cliches because they contain dollops of truth is as much a truth as it is a cliche."*

Since nobody reads anymore, nobody knows anything about the publishing business. But there's a showbiz cliche that applies to book publishing as surely as it applies to Broadway and Hollywood: "You can't get a job unless you have an agent, and you can't get an agent unless you've had a job."

True. And in the book publishing world, you can't get an agent unless you're already famous, or unless you come to that charlatan, that crook, that sleazeball, the agent, recommended by somebody who is already famous. If Cormac McCarthy tells his agent, "Check out this guy Kelley Dupuis, he's brilliant," I'm in with Flynn. If not, I'm down in the subway declaiming my poetry with a jar next to me for tips, and a lot of people shaking their heads in disbelief as they shuffle by.

So, at age 52 I decided, "Screw agents. Screw the Avenue of the Americas. Screw all so-called 'real' publishers."  I will no longer worry about leaving a snail-trail across some "literary agent's" driveway as I crawl up to that most-likely-only-semi-literate douchebag's front door to beg, beg, beg him for a favor. Screw him and screw his sleazy business. From now on, I write purely for the joy of it, for the delectation of myself and a few friends. And if I never get on the Oprah Winfrey Show, who cares? She always made me faintly queasy anyway. All that hugging and stagey weeping. Eek. (I know that Oprah's audience is 98% female. Do women really fall for that crap?)

Sour grapes? Yeah, maybe. But Gore Vidal pointed out a few years ago that the audience for serious literature in America amounts to perhaps 7,000 people. Out of 250 million. Seven thousand people.

Hey, everyone. Things like serious literary fiction and poetry are going (or have already gone) the way of chess. Soon they will be (poetry already is) a miniscule niche market, capturing the interest of only a handful of enthusiasts, ignored by the 250 million who only want to watch CSI and play idiotic computer games like Captain Anthrax.



Given this state of affairs, why should I worry about whether I become the next Ernest Hemingway or not? There isn't going to be another Ernest Hemingway. The age of the "celebrity novelist" is over and done with. Nobody reads books anymore, unless of course they're shorter than 225 pages and deal with either celebrity gossip, the latest insane diet, or that good old perennial book-seller, sex. Or if they're "scandalous" in the only sense that "scandalous" means anything these days, e.g. challenging traditional belief of one sort or another, like The Da Vinci Code, as spurious a pile of crap as was ever piled, and naturally, a smash hit.

I've been thinking about these things again lately. Why?  Because I have not changed my views in the last four years, and now, on the eve of my 56th birthday, after writing poetry for more than 40 years, I'm going to bring out a volume of my poems. It's in production now.

It will be first book of poems, and probably my last.

At the same time, my friend Dianne, who lives in the state of Washington, is bringing out a volume of her own poems. It is also her first.

My book will be called The Key. Dianne's is called Howling At The Dark Side Of The Moon. My POD publisher is Outskirts Press. I've worked with them before. Dianne's is Trafford.

Dianne and I have been having an e-mail discussion of issues relating to POD publishing. I felt a need to straighten her out about the distinction between POD and old-style "Vanity Press." They're not the same. Also, I felt the need to remind Dianne, if she didn't already know it, that literary agents who charge money for their "services" are even bigger crooks than those who don't. A "legitimate" agent (if there is such a thing) will NOT charge an author money for his or her services. They get their kick-back from the publisher. An agent who asks you for money up-front is basically the literary equivalent of a drug-dealer. Avoid that dirtball. He's a dirtball.



So ... here you drop in on the conversation....(my half of it, anyway)...


Dear Dianne,

Just remember, I make a distinction between POD and old-style Vanity Press. They are NOT the same. POD offers a suite of services; vanity press was just a printer. Vanity Press outlets like Vantage Press (which is where the term "vanity press" came from) would design a product for you for some exorbitant amount of money, print 100 copies of your book and then ship them to you in boxes, whereupon they would sit in your garage and get moldy.

POD is just what it says: print-on-demand. Order one copy, they print one copy. Order five, they print five.

Obviously the digital age enabled this; in the old cold-type world this wouldn't have been possible. But now, in the digital age, POD publishers provide marketing and advertising services, and even editing services, if you want to pay for that. POD does more of what a "real" publisher does than Vanity Press ever did. But of course you are the client, and if you want that extra service, you have to pay for it.

But that, too, has an up-side, and it is exactly the same up-side you get when you're "the customer" anywhere else: if Jack-in-the-Box asks "Do you want fries with with that?" You have the option of saying "No, thanks, not today."

POD is buffet-shopping for authors: take what you need, spend as much as you want, leave the rest. Use your head.


Despite the increasingly-wheezy efforts of the New York Publishers' Inbreeding Club to sneer it away at book fairs, POD is here to stay. (New York, on the other hand, could be nuked and I would consider it no big loss.)

Well, okay, there are issues. POD's obvious downside is that there's little quality control. Yes, they do have editors and they will make suggestions, but nothing is "juried," as the snotfaces in the publishing industry say. Nobody's going to say "No, we won't publish your book," unless of course it's obviously libelous, sufficiently obscene to attract attention in today's world, where nobody even acknowledges the existence of obscenity, (how obscene would that have to be?) or if it not only calls for New York to be nuked ... but shows you how it might easily be done for less than $500. These things might get even a POD publisher to turn you down.

But by and large, anyone who can cough up the money can get his or her book published, whether they can write or not. And, yes, I've seen some self-published books that were so awful they had me laughing out loud.

But I have also seen books issued by The Respectable New York Publishing House that were so idiotic they had me laughing out loud. Or expressing disgust. I once saw in a bookstore (I swear I'm not making this up) a "legitimately"- published novel whose main character was a roach. I am not talking about Gregor Samsa, whose metamorphosis was a metaphor for his miserable human life (and by the way, Kafka's Gregor was a domed beetle, according to that meticulous nit-picker Vladimir Nabokov, not a roach.) I'm talking about an honest-to-God roach, as in, "a member of a nest of roaches, whose mama was a roach." A novel about roaches. I can only assume that whatever "legitimate" publisher gave the green light to that project must have been (a) Stoned out of his mind, (b) In need of the aforementioned Thorazine or (c) The subject of a videotape shot at last year's holiday party featuring himself, two hookers and a Great Dane.

How many copies do you think this "legitimately" published, "juried" novel sold? We'll start at five, which probably covers the author's immediate family.  I'd say a bid up from there would be optimistic. I'd also guess that even his immediate family was, by and large, grossed out. Some of them might even have suggested that he join his publisher on Thorazine.

Publishing is like showbiz -- sometimes a blowjob will accomplish miracles. Remember Pia Zadora? Somebody was obviously blowing somebody to get her into the movies.

But POD's obvious upside is that people like myself, and yourself, who can write well but never managed to crash the party because we didn't know the right people, can get into print. Without begging on our knees, that's the part I like. POD levels the playing field. Once you get your product ready, it's just a question of doing what the so-called "real" publishers do for yourself, e.g. cadge reviews and spread the word. Nobody reads books anymore anyway, so it's not like you're missing the big riverboat if Harper and Row doesn't "do" your book for you -- have you noticed how many Harper and Row titles, not to mention Scribners, MacMillan, and all the rest, wind up on the "bargain" table of your local bookstore within a year? That means they've been "remaindered." They didn't sell especially well, so it's "Mark the price down, baby. Get as rid of as many as you can and pulp the rest."

Let me tell you about my favorite example of this. In 1991, Vikram Seth published his mammoth "masterpiece," A Suitable Boy. My opinion at the time was that that was a rather "lightweight" title for a towering masterpiece, but it's an author's right to choose his or her own title. (Although sometimes authors do second-think themselves on this score. Example: Catch-22.  Joseph Heller wanted to call his novel, which the Vietnam era turned into an anti-war classic, Catch-18.  But Heller's book was published in 1961, not long after the publication of Leon Uris' Mila 18. Heller's publishers persuaded him to change the "18" to a "22" so the two novels wouldn't be confused with each other.)

But getting back to A Suitable Boy. The critics in 1991 were comparing poor Vikram Seth with Goethe and Tolstoy. An honor? Well, yes, but with a big razor attached. Writers and serious readers would appreciate how appalling must have been that kind of pressure on the author. Being compared with Goethe and Tolstoy? That Seth went on to write An Equal Music and other works is testimony to an apparent, miraculous ability on Seth's part to tune out media-noise. God bless him.

But even as long ago as 1991, most TV-watching idiots (and that accounts for most of the population of the western hemisphere) couldn't have picked Goethe and Tolstoy out of a police lineup. Vikram Seth is among the last of the great dinosaurs, the final generation of literary geniuses in English. The ones nobody reads anymore. (Except the 7,000, in America anyway. And I flatter myself that I am a member of the seven thousand. I'm a fan of Vikram Seth's. Someday I hope to be able to tell him, face-to-face, how I came to read his book The Golden Gate in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1993.)

Within 18 months A Suitable Boy, this masterpiece that had the London critics creaming in their pants, was on the "bargain" table. His masterpiece was "remaindered" after a year and a half.

And so...if a genius like Vikram Seth sees his masterpiece remaindered just 18 months after the critics are hyperventilating about it, where do you suppose I found my storied novel about the roaches?

DING! Correct! The "bargain table." I'd be surprised if it lasted on the store shelves more than six and a half minutes before being remaindered. I'd be just as willing to bet that the middle-management type at Snotnose and Company, Avenue of the Americas, New York, who approved its production was sent on a vacation to rest and recuperate. Or better yet, fired for smoking dope at the control point, as we used to say in radio.

Gore Vidal was right. The great age of books is over. Cinema is now the art of the moment. So, since ain't nobody gonna read our books anyway, why should we cultivate a supple spine crawling on our knees toward the Avenue of the Americas? POD is taking over more and more market share as, ironically, the market for good books spirals ever downward. Given Gore Vidal's demographic numbers, (I don't know where he got them, but given what I see around me, they sound perfectly credible to me) who needs Scribners? Scribners was relevant in 1925. Only Dreamworks and Tri-Star are relevant today.

Henry Miller once said, "Paint as you like and die happy!" I'll go along with that. And now the war-cry is "Publish as you like and die happy!" None of us is going to get famous, or rich, by writing. Not unless by some miracle Oprah Winfrey happens to take a liking to what we've done and hugs us on TV. Ain't gonna happen.

So. Do you want to write or don't you? Write as you like, publish as you like, spread the word as you can...and die happy.

*Actually, I said this, in my book Three Flies Up (Outskirts Press, 2008.)

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