The Publishing Business

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

From the outside, publishing used to look a bit like an enormous skyscraper, maybe shaped a bit like a pyramid, with a tiny top poking out of the clouds above and a row of doors at the bottom with the names of editors and agents written on them. Writers would queue up in front of the doors and stuff manuscripts through the mail slot, wait until the manuscript came out, and move to the next door to repeat the process. Every so often a choir of angels would sing, a door would open, and a chosen writer would be invited into the mysterious building beyond to “get published” (and hopefully work their way up to that rarefied top floor).

What wasn’t clear from the outside (and what nobody there wanted to hear) was that the inside of the building looked like a labyrinth designed by Esher & Dali, Inc., with winding routes that led nowhere, ladders that looked as if they went up but ended back on the same floor, elevators that felt like they were going up only to drop you off in the basement, and so on.

The bad news is: today, it’s even worse.

Today, the building is larger. If you look up and squint, you can see four or five separate “top levels” poking out of the clouds, but you can’t see how everything connects to the bottom. The street level has multiple groups of doors, plus a bunch of kiosks that have set up outside, and a couple of tunnels that might be shortcuts or might be dead ends. And Escher seems to have added a couple of flights of stairs to the outside of the building.

The inside is even worse. There are random anti-gravity chutes that bypass many floors at once…but you don’t know whether they’re taking you up or down until you get off. There are more kiosks and doors, places where people are walking upside down on the ceiling, occasional hedge-mazes, unexpected swimming pools and water slides. And all of it keeps rearranging itself, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, always unexpectedly. The only thing that stays the same is that most people don’t want to hear about it; they just want a reliable map that’ll get them through it. And there isn’t one.

Every writer’s path through this insane maze is different. Where you start does not determine where you end up. Planning helps, but planning too far ahead or too specifically may lead to missing opportunities (or taking opportunities that lead you away from wherever you eventually want to get).

This is what the rest of the writing game looks like. Navigating it requires flexibility, clear sight, and brutal self-honesty. You get faced with a lot of decisions, which you have to make on insufficient information (and often under time pressure). The best way I have found to deal with this is to be honest with myself about what I can and can’t control, what I’m good at and what I’m not, what I enjoy or hate doing, and what I’ll feel like if the whole project goes sideways in the worst possible way.

It’s essentially a personal-cost/benefit survey:  What is this project going to require of me in terms of time and energy? Do I think I have the needed skills and information, or will I have to acquire them? Is it going to be an energy drain or a passion project? What am I not going to have time to do if I work on this? If I sink six months or a year into this project, and it fails miserably, am I going to resent having agreed to do it? Will it wreck any friendships if it fails? Do I need this to pay the bills?

Some examples: A couple of times over the past forty years, I’ve been asked to edit anthologies. The first time, I thought about it carefully. My best guess was that it would take a year or more of my writing time. Probably more, because I’d never edited anything and I’d have to learn the process on the fly. At the time, I had several books in the to-write queue that I really wanted to get to, which I would have to put off. I liked the concept behind the anthology, but not enough to drop everything and push it forward. It wasn’t going to pay any more than selling the next book…probably less, depending on the way the contracts worked out. And I’d be committing to doing a lot of bookkeeping to split the royalties among the authors, for as long as the anthology stayed in print. I turned it down. Having done that thinking, I also turned down the next one–I’d decided I wasn’t an editor.

Another: I was asked to teach a course on writing at the local writing center. It sounded like fun, and the pay was reasonable. I really like talking about writing. I’d never taught a class, but I’d been in a crit group and done panels, so I had some skills but not all. It was a six-week commitment, once a week, so not a huge time problem, and a good way to test whether I wanted to do more of this kind of thing. I accepted. I discovered that I do enjoy teaching, but my heart is in writing. So I’ve done a few other workshops and classes over the years, but it’s never been a major aspect of my writing career.

Another: I got an unexpected phone call asking me to write the middle-school novelization of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Surprisingly, I got a fair amount of pressure from various people not to agree (the comment I recall best was “Hollywood will swallow you and we’ll never see another real Patricia Wrede novel again!”). Obviously, I chose to do it (in addition to being a blast, it paid very well for work-for-hire, and I learned a lot of stuff about novelizing things). And when that trilogy was done, I went back to writing my own stuff, because it was clear that while this gig worked, writing up someone else’s plots is something I’m only interested in on a case-by-case basis. It’s not what I want to pursue as a main focus for my career.

All of those decisions were unexpected. Any of them could have taken my career in a new direction, if I’d chosen to pursue things further. To me, though, the most important thing about those decisions is that when I think about them in retrospect, I am happy about the choices I made, even the ones that didn’t work out as well as I thought they would.