The Publishing Industry is Capricious... Gamble on Yourself

Art and commerce have long been intimate bedfellows, and contemporary publishing presents no particular exception. While—sorry—only a fraction of the books that get published qualify as art, even the ones that emphatically do are also products. Displayed on a shelf. Added to cart. As such: they are given a price. Not just per copy in various formats, but upstream, generally via the speculative transaction between publishing houses, authors, and agents known as an advance against royalties.

There is a natural temptation to read a great deal into the specific numbers behind these transactions, a temptation which Maria Kuznetsova, in her recent essay “The Publishing Industry Gambled on Me… And Lost” indulges without hesitation. I am here to argue we should—indeed, must—hesitate. Not only does the extant relationship between art and commerce imply no causal relationship between commercial performance and literary quality, but this false implication is itself a pernicious impediment to both the creation and profitable production of great art.

Ironically, had Kuznetsova followed the advice of the editor who rejected her new novel and avoided the personal and biographical in this piece, she might have landed some salient points. Is the publishing industry overly enamored of debuts? Probably so. Are authors unfairly held accountable for sales track when publishers disproportionately control productization decisions like title, cover, and publicity and marketing strategy? It would be hard to contend otherwise.

Unfortunately, in relaying the details of her own publishing trajectory, Kuznetsova illustrates some of the most ridiculous attitudes and expectations associated with the broader institutional professionalization of novel-writing, undercutting the valid arguments she aims to support. I will address these institution by institution from the publishing industry to the academy, turning toward what I think is a better artistic North Star: the post-mortem house museum.

The publishing industry
“The logic didn’t compute,” Kuznetsova writes of her experience going from her first two books selling at auction for a “bloated” advance to her third—which she and her agent thought was better—being rejected by editor after editor.

I submit a simple reason for this: there is no logic. There are excellent novels that receive massive advances and no advances at all, that earn out or don’t come close. Likewise, there are steaming piles of trash that mercifully remain unpublished—and others that fetch bank. In recounting her Icarian rise and fall, Kuznetsova reads too much into the publishing industry’s commercial reactions to her work at every juncture; she is overly buoyed by success, and overly despondent in failure, doubting “the quality of [her] own work” until she reminds herself: “my ‘too autobiographical’ writing did get me into Iowa and was the reason I was courted by seven editors, leading me to think I was doing everything right.”

The material support for writing can come from anywhere, and we should not import qualitative weight to its source.

But the souped-up auction dynamics surrounding her first two novels might have just as easily been about the homogeneity of editorial taste or predictable mechanics of mimetic desire or some passing trend than anything she was or wasn’t doing. Engaging in this sort of post-game analysis is a futile exercise, begging loyalty to an erratic king—suggesting you contort your art to a fickle business disinclined to reciprocate.

Moreover, in a market where supply far outpaces demand, rejection is more or less the default authorial state.

To assert “I had held up my end of the bargain. I wrote, and rewrote, the best books I could. Being punished for my sales made about as much sense as it would for me to blame my publicist for the fact that my first novel had a meandering plot” precariously approaches entitlement. It does not follow from the legitimate gripe of unduly holding authors accountable for sales track in general that any particular book’s failure to sell constitutes an individual “punishment.”

The “bargain” she struck with her publisher seems to have included two books. They chose, perhaps entirely due to track (but conceivably including other factors—say, a “meandering plot”?), not to strike another for her third. Whatever the reason or reasons, as we often take for granted in other businesses, past performance does not guarantee future results.

Not that the publishing industry can’t or shouldn’t address the more general problem Kuznetsova highlights, which applies to this dictum, too. And I do think there is a fairly simple formula more conducive to giving the best literary art the best chance at commercial success: hire a diverse array of editors, pay them a living wage, and let them buy the books they like best. It would be great if someone tried this! But regardless, the only recourse for serious novelists is to stand by their work irrespective of market response, rejoicing in any commercial success for the sheer good luck that it is.

The academy
Kuznetsova expresses gratitude for her early publishing fortune, and in particular its role in landing her a “highly coveted” university professorship, even as her portrait of the academy’s creative benefits is inverted and stunningly bleak. Tenure offers a bourgeois buttress absolving artistic output; literature professors “gush[] about their favorite dragon sex books.”

There is one thing and one thing only that can make you a great novelist, and that is writing a great novel.

Now, bourgeois comfort is wonderful—I rather enjoy it myself. But the role of art is not to supply bourgeois comfort; a benefit of bourgeois comfort is the freedom to make art.

This is an essential distinction applicable well beyond academia; the material support for writing can come from anywhere, and we should not import qualitative weight to its source. Still, tenure is probably its most legible surface for misunderstanding. Tenure is the quintessential “chance to keep going”—to write what you want to write insulated from a capricious market. To claim the opposite rings hollow at best, if not mendacious.

You can start to see outlines of the backlash against the MFA industrial complex here, though to my mind these programs are basically a neutral literary development. Again, and without absolving universities of their duties (to knowledge, truth, employment ethics, &c.), the problem lies less in these institutions themselves than in inappropriate and inflated expectations of them.

MFA programs can provide the time and resources to write—the freedom to make art—and they can credentialize students to teach. What they cannot do is provide a reliable shortcut for assessing the literary quality or potential commercial success of a work, let alone some hypothetical talent on the basis of affiliation. There is one thing and one thing only that can make you a great novelist, and that is writing a great novel. (I maintain one of most salient metaphors for literary talent is in basketball!)

Some of the best evidence to this effect can be found tucked into great novels themselves. Casaubon and his doomed “Key to All Mythologies” comes to mind. Hayward in W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage perhaps delivers a better example still:

“How can you say you’ve known a hundred and forty-seven of him?” asked Philip seriously.

“I’ve met him in the Latin Quarter in Paris, and I’ve met him in the pensions in Berlin and Munich. He lives in small hotels in Perugia and Assisi. He stands by the dozen before the Botticellis in Florence, and he sits on all the benches of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In Italy he drinks a little too much wine, and in Germany he drinks a great deal too much beer. He always admires the right thing whatever the right thing is, and one of these days he’s going to write a great work. Think of it, there are a hundred and forty-seven great works reposing in the bosoms of a hundred and forty-seven great men, and the tragic thing is that not one of those hundred and forty-seven great works will ever be written. And yet the world goes on.”

Weeks spoke seriously, but his gray eyes twinkled a little at the end of his long speech, and Philip flushed when he saw that the American was making fun of him.

The post-mortem house museum
If the contemporary institutions we might expect to reliably support high-quality work only do so haphazardly, I think there is another to which we might turn. A hypothetical institution, admittedly, but one that unfailingly supports the mindset I find most conducive to artistic productivity: your own house, turned into a museum after you die.

I am not being glib. Fixing your sights on a post-mortem house museum simultaneously incentivizes you to embrace the models, work ethic, timeframe, and material surroundings most conducive to creating the highest caliber art of which you are capable.

Which authors’ houses get made into museums? Well, the best. There is Jane Austen’s House in Chawton. Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana, the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome. There is Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, where he wrote Moby-Dick—the epitome of a great mid-career novel and a decided commercial failure in Melville’s own era.

Arrowhead remained in private hands until the Berkshire County Historical Society purchased it in the 1970s, eighty-some years after his death and more than a century after Moby-Dick was published in 1851. Such belated recognition is hardly exceptional. Great novelists are prophets, regularly under-appreciated in our own time. Vita brevis, ars longa. Life is short, art long! And literary fame a white whale. Anchoring to a house museum aims your institutional goals at the appropriate horizon. You will never know whether or not you succeed, and you can never be disappointed.

Best of all, this sort of orientation helps to realize that elusive timeless-temporal balance in your work itself. Save your megalomania for that. (And maybe a little interior design.)