Most of my ancestors were Irish. A lot of them saw that sign when they hit the streets of the New World looking for work.
I subscribe to the Authors Publish regular email, which is a very valuable source of publishers and publishing opportunities. Obviously, not all of them are of relevance to me, so I have to trawl through them and find the ones that suit my body of work. I’ve found a good number of suitable opportunities in those data sets. I haven’t sold to any of them yet, but hope springs eternal. In the meantime, I self-publish on Amazon. Self publishing means that I have to do all the things that publishers traditionally do, from cover design to typesetting.
One can, of course, hire professionals for those things. That’s an investment, and I have a limited budget. So there is a lot of DIY there. That is a sub-optimal situation. Agents and publishers exist for quite a few good reasons. One of those reasons is to find and develop promising new writers. Someone with a string of bestsellers and awards to their name is a pretty easy sell on both ends.
It’s also pretty easy to justify an investment in high-powered and high-priced professionals to do the cover design, editing and promotion to give that next book the best chance of being another bestseller.
There are some exceptions to this Catch-22. Recently, Commander Chris Hadfield, the well-known astronaut, published two Cold War techo-thrillers. They were, unstartlingly, incredibly accurate as to the technical details and well written generally. I was not the only one who was easily convinced that they would be very good reads, as indeed they were. Promoting them rested on the very solid foundation of his distinguished record.
A YouTuber who I follow basically went through the creative process of plotting and writing a fantasy novel on her YouTube channel, in her inimitable and rather snarky style. According to her, it sold quite well in self-publishing. Not surprisingly, the great majority of those sales were to her YouTube subscribers.
I don’t have any problem with that. These folks brought to the table the fruit of years of effort. Their success was well earned before they ever put their fingers to the keyboard.
That Authors Publish email had a link to a list of publishers. It was entitled, “78 Opportunities for Historically Underrepresented Authors in August 2024”
That’s 78 publishers who basically have a sign up, “Straight White Males Need Not Apply”. Authors Publish saved me a lot of time, because I didn’t even read that list, let alone submit to any of them.
I’m not going to whine about it. I’m a big boy with thick skin, and if I’m not welcome then I’ll go elsewhere. It did, however, give me to think. Something as blatant as that is generally the tip of the iceberg. I’m willing to bet that there a lot of publishers where that sign is on the editor’s desk instead of the submissions page of their website. That’s a pretty high wall for any new author to climb.
So, first of all, turn about is fair play. How much of an uproar would there be if that list had been entitled “78 Opportunities for Straight White Male Authors in August 2024.”? The answer to that question I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
Now, undoubtedly, those publishers will say in tones of righteousness that they are righting the balance for generations of discrimination and injustice. That argument is right there in the title of that list.
Hmm. They know nothing of me except my skin colour, gender and sexual preference, but I am guilty in their eyes for all the real and fancied wrongs of my ancestors back to, I don’t know, the Stone Age? And, of course, I get no credit for anything said ancestors might have done right, like fighting to abolish slavery.
Returning injustice for injustice in revenge may be satisfying to angry people, but revenge has its costs. There is an old Chinese proverb, “When you set out on revenge, dig two graves, one for your enemy and one for yourself.”
That cost to those publishers might not be paid right away, but I’m pretty sure it will be in time. As I was told by the bestselling author Robert Sawyer, the traditional publishing industry is ferociously competitive for authors, especially in my chosen area of science fiction. You have to be very good to get a shot, and you basically only get one. The time window for that shot is sixty days. If you don’t do well that first time out, you don’t get another.
The publishers have a hard row to hoe, too. There are a lot of publishers trying to get their books onto bookstore shelves, so they have to convince the owners of those shelves that those books will sell. Sales are the coin of the realm there. Ideology doesn’t cut it.
There are exceptions to that rule, of course. Some bookstore owners share that ideological bent. They too are subject to that same competitive pressure. What with the competition from Amazon and other on-line outlets, they have to do it right to survive, far less flourish.
These publishers are cutting their pool of potential new authors drastically, cutting their audience to those of their own ideology, and each of them is competing for that limited amount of business.
I’ll close with an old Arab proverb. “If you wait patiently, they will carry the body of your enemy past your door.”
I’m going to keep on writing and self-publishing, and submitting to publishers who are interested in the quality of my writing, not the colour of my skin.
I’ll let the marketplace carry the ideologues away, and not even bother to look.
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