Tag: indie publishing

The problem with literary agents:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

“Almost all agencies, he told me, are looking for one of two things: bestseller potential or the possibility of media adaptations…

Let us hope that what that agent told me was a gross exaggeration born out of personal disenchantment. (Everyone in the publishing industry these days seems pretty disgruntled.) After all, good and serious books still manage to get published. Yet after plowing through hundreds of agency websites, I find it hard to believe that many other good and serious books aren’t being stopped dead in their tracks. The nomenclature is the first tip off. Nothing wrong with a little business jargon, but must they call themselves “boutique agencies” or, even worse, “full-service boutique agencies,” which, rather than lending the snob cachet so obviously intended, makes them sound like massage parlors? Far worse than any unfortunate phraseology is the resistance to ideas that contradicts the otherwise high-sounding claims made on so many of the agencies’ websites…

Unlike furiously anti-establishment bloggers, I have no problem with the role played by literary agents as cultural gatekeepers. There are far too many writers out there, and if the good ones are not to be buried by the bad ones, agents have an obligation to recognize and nurture talent that might otherwise go undetected. Economies of scale, to which the publishing industry remains bound, tend to favor the mass publication of trash, and the trash isn’t always so trashy. Only the sourest puritan would disdain genre fiction as inventive as George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones saga merely because there are five clichés to a page. But economies of scale also allow for the publication of midlist books supported by all that trash, not to mention by all those indispensible guides to gastro-intestinal disorders, college entrance exams, and the rest.

…As I’ve said, significant books still get published, and there are inspiring literary agents helping to make such works a reality. I’d like to see more of such books, yet the grotesque philistinism of so many literary agencies works against that outcome—and you can’t get to the publishers without the agencies. It’s no accident that much of the best American writing today is to be found not inside the covers of a book but in magazines and online journals.

…So why beat up on literary agencies? Aren’t publishing houses equally risk averse? Possibly so, but in mediating between writer and publisher, the agencies build in an extra layer of exactly what is not needed: more conservatism and caution. Am I naïve in believing that publishing houses might be slightly more receptive to innovation than most literary agencies imagine? A literary scholar of my acquaintance told me he knows of three first-rate studies of W. H. Auden that have no chance of getting out of manuscript. Never mind my book. I want to see the ones about Auden.”

-Stephen Akey. Read the rest.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]

Should you Self-Publish or go Traditional? Infographic:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler
Self-Publishing or Traditional Publishing: Which Should You Choose?
Courtesy of: The Write Life

John Green on the footnote:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

“The fact is that if you attend college, you end up spending quite a lot of time alone with footnotes, and you may eventually start to notice that footnotes are–consistently–the wittiest and most enjoyable parts of hefty texts. (For instance, I am a huge fan of the footnotes in a book called Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde, which incidentally is a fantastic book if you are into that kind of thing.) And so it is inevitable that the reasonably well-educated person falls in love with footnotes, and starts thinking about what footnotes could do and be. It’s perfectly plausible to believe that all fourteen million writers who use footnotes in their books just came up with the idea independently when they noticed how footnotes can allow you to create a kind of secret second narrative, which is important if, say, you’re writing a book about what a story is and whether stories are significant…

I’ve had this crackpot theory for a long time that the real progenitor of many contemporary YA novels isn’t Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace or Annie Get Your Gun or Forever or any of that, but instead David Foster Wallace’s 1100 page (and massively footnoted) second novel Infinite Jest,. I know for a fact that E. and I have read IJ. Infinite Jest IS a coming-of-age story, or at least it contains a coming-of-age story, but I would never argue that it is itself a book for teenagers. It’s just that literary young adult writers have adopted–whether directly or indirectly–a host of techniques from the book, including weird and largely inexplicable abbreviations (henceforeth WALIAs), a breathless narrative voice that isn’t quite stream-of-consciousness, repetition of the word and, and footnotes. Infinite Jest is a major book, certainly, and it’s been influential in the world of adult literature, too. But if you’ve read, say, 100 ‘literary’ ya novels, and then you read Infinite Jest, I feel like it’s hard not to be struck by how many of those 100 books owe something in some way to DFW that they would not otherwise have. So nothing against Mr. Stroud, but I think when we’re talking WALIAs or footnotes, we have David Foster Wallace to thank (well, if thanks are to be given. I really believe that footnotes are pretty great if done well, and if you disagree with me then I hope we can have a fight about it in the comment section, which is basically the blog equivalent of footnotes).”

– John Green, from a rant on his blog, dated 2006.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

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