Publish And Be Craven!

Franz Kafka was not published during his lifetime. Well, that's not entirely true; a few of his short stories did achieve publication but were hardly noticed. Had his literary executor complied with Kafka's wishes, all of Kafka's manuscripts would have been destroyed upon his death and we would never have heard of a man described by the Wikipedia entry as "one of the major German-language novelists and short story writers of the 20th century".

I find that a sobering thought. Perhaps not so much from recognition of how close Kafka came to complete obscurity (his works did survive, after all), but rather from the realization that there may be many more great writers who never become known*. We are so at the mercy of publishers, especially today when they must consider economics above all else. How many important and ground-breaking manuscripts are being passed over because they're not "commercial"? And how many great writers are being overlooked because selling themselves is alien to their character or ideals?

You can say that any writer who cannot sell his books deserves obscurity (and, in a way, all the "How to Get Published" books are saying exactly that) but this merely encourages a culture in which the salesman is published and the writer fades away. Strangely and yet logically too, writers write for the very reason that they are not adept in the spoken word, that they write because it is the most effective way they have found for communicating. Is it any wonder that many of them should be hopeless at persuading publishers to take a chance on them?

And it seems to me that the situation is getting worse (perhaps I've been reading too many of those "How to Get Published" books). There was a time when publishers were prepared to take risks, to publish for quality rather than economic concerns. Consider the book that tops most polls for greatest book of the 20th Century, for instance. Yes, that would be Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. It was originally published in 1954/1955 by Allen & Unwin, a publication house that took many chances and discovered some classics as a result. There was no great hype surrounding the publication and for ten years it sold reasonably well but broke no records. Then, in the sixties, it was "discovered" and really took off, creating a whole new publishing industry as it did so.

I am certain that, were Lord of the Rings submitted to publishers today, remembering that there would be no fantasy genre since it was LOTR that created the market, it would find no takers. Gone are the publishers that would take on something different, a book that set new boundaries and broke all the "rules". Those quirky family concerns that published because they loved literature have all been absorbed into a few giant houses run by bean counters. Even the remaining small publishers have to be ever mindful of a book's chances in terms of market and statistics.

The irony is that modern publishers effectively cut themselves off from the possibility of a gold strike, that one in a thousand that strikes a chord in the psyche of millions and becomes a publishing phenomenon. Instead, they rely on the continuing popularity of formula writers, the Steven Kings and John Grishams, forgetting that once, in the distant past, some editor took a gamble on even these.

What chance does anything new and different stand in the publishing world of today? Where are the modern classics that will still have readerships ten generations from now? Who is writing stuff that will still have relevance a hundred, two hundred years from its time? Just one thing I know: that such works are being created. Every age has its great writers and ours is no exception, I'm sure. The only difference is that no-one is publishing them.

Their day will come, rest assured of that. Fifty years from now those manuscripts will be discovered, printed and change the world. Too late for the poor writer, of course, and that really bites my bum. I have always detested the fact that an artist's work increases in value the moment he dies.

Maybe we are witnessing the death of traditional publishing, grown too fearful and cautious to survive, and we must look to electronic forms to take up the torch of literature. It may even be inevitable, POD being so much more economical than other methods. And, if it means that quality becomes a factor again, I say roll on the day.

--ooOoo--

*That's right, this is not a sentence as it contains no active verb. According to the rules, it should be tacked on to the preceding sentence by a comma. But I happen to prefer it this way because that is how we would speak it. Rules are made to be broken, after all.

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