Failed Writer's Journey: Why Doesn't Publishing Act Like Sports?

Now the headlines are not just nerdy but positively opaque. But, seriously, why doesn’t the publishing industry act like sports?

Connor Bedard and Macklin Celebrini are two up-and-coming, young hockey players whom both of their respective teams tanked (deliberately creating teams they knew would lose) in order to try and obtain them. Neither player was a superstar in their first year, though both were good. Both, last year, played at a very high level (at least until Bedard got injured). Both teams expect the players to lead them, respectively, back into contention in the near future. Part of that expectation is that their teams expect both players to get better as they get more experience and learn how to play the game more effectively. And these two players are not an exception — every sport behaves like this. And if you understand how to identify potentially good players before they reach their peak skill — not, I should add, an easy task — then you can build a contender relatively quickly. But the key is that you let your young players learn and grow — you do not expect them to be superstars right out of the gate. If Bedard and Celebrini were authors, however, their careers would likely already be over.

In publishing, only the out-of-the-gate superstars have a real chance, anymore, to build a career. It is very hard to build a sustainable career by starting small, improving, and growing into your skills. Publishers do not take the time to build authors. There will be no Forslings or MacKinnons — extremely good players, one of which has won the NHL’s most valuable player award — who did not live up to their initial expectations. But each player kept improving and eventually they became stars, players you can win a championship with. Instead, publishers expect all authors to be Sidney Crosby — instant superstars. They hand out large deals to new authors and then abandon those authors if they do not live up to expectations. They fill their roster with authors on much smaller deals, provide little to no support, and then dump them when they fail to reach superstar status. It is, to be gentle, a less-than-efficient means of running a business.

It also did not use to be this way. Many authors, such as Cormac McCarthy, started with small books and were nurtured until the point they became the literary equivalent of all-stars. This no longer seems to be a viable path. Publishers, possibly driven by analytics, an internal conviction that they do not know how to sell books, and a marriage to the ironclad rule of Wall Street to have mega hits, have abandoned the concept of a writer’s career. They instead seem to be stuck cycling through debut authors and hoping that the money from those authors will carry them through to the next set of debut authors. Outside of the handful of megastars, the only way to have a writing career that involves a traditional publisher, it seems, is for authors to get a traditional publishing deal and then either sell directly to fans introduced to them by those books or transition into something like teaching based on their publishing credentials. We have an industry, then, so afraid of building talent that it overspends in the free-agent market and destroys its salary structure in the process — to go all in on the sports team metaphor. And no one wins that way.

One has to wonder how long this can continue until some publisher tries to spend $50,000 per author over a number of years as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dollars once or twice. If that ever happens, I suspect that a publisher that spends the time and money to learn how to build author careers will find itself astride the industry.

Weekly Word Count

Not sure, honestly. I rewrote a screenplay to submit to the Academy Nicholl Fellowships contest. That had to be dozens of pages, and I did a fair amount of work on the Encyclopedia Brick project. It has been fun trying to learn how to turn my very wordy output into a graphic novel. It is an interesting and eye-opening way to think about building stories. I find as long as I am doing things each week, I am happier if I don’t worry about the number of words. There is, I am finding, such a thing as too much data.

Have a great weekend, everyone.