Longtime readers, or insomniacs who like to read a
lot of back posts, know about my "seven observations" posts, where I
list seven things I've been thinking about and then riff on them till I've
produced something that may be converging toward coherent. I guess newcomers and anyone who wandered in
by accident are about to find out. In
general if the title is a seemingly
random list of stuff that doesn't appear to add up to anything coherent,
probably it will be one of those posts. If the content is, it's really one of
those posts.
Okay, let's go with that list:
1.
Officially the
US Small Business Administration says that to be a small business, "the
business must have no more than 500 employees for most manufacturing and mining
industries, and no more than $7 million in average annual receipts for most
nonmanufacturing industries." So
with the possible exceptions of J.K. Rowling and a handful of others, and maybe
some publisher-packager boiler rooms, pretty much all fiction in the United
States is produced by small businesses, at least as those nosy government types
define it.
2.
It's an old
number and almost certainly is lower now, but back in 2006, when paper books
were really pretty much all there was, Publisher's Weekly reported that the
average book in America sold just under 3,000 copies over its whole lifetime. A
common rough-and-ready rule is that most book copies will average about 3
readers before ending up in the trash, a book hoarder's stash, or an MFA art
student's collage. We talk all the time about our "communities of
readers", which means people who have read the same work and might talk
about it together. So figure each
published paper book creates a community of fewer than 10,000. This also fits
with the marketing concept of "base", the number of people who buy
most of the work of a given author based on the name alone. Not all publishers calculate
base and many try to keep it secret, but a typical number for a traditionally
published mid-list writer (5 or more books out, no best-sellers, still getting
offers but not increases in advances for the next book) might be around 10,000.
So those "communities of readers" tend, from two different measures,
to be about 10,000 people or so.
3.
The Office of
Management and Budget, because so many policy decisions are made based on its
data, has put a lot of effort into categorization of villages, cities, towns,etc. North American geography is pretty odd by the standards of the rest of the
world, but OMB's criteria break down into big, middle, and small cities, the
latter being 50,000 people and up, with every county from which more than 25%
of the population commutes into the central area being counted as part of the
city; "micropolitan counties," which are counties with at least one
town larger than 10,000* where more than 75% of workers stay in-county; and
"non-metro," which are counties that have only "small
towns," defined as towns with less than 10,000 people.
4.
Combine all
those definitions and here's a reality: nearly all fiction writers out there,
including the successful ones, are small businesspeople working for a community
that isn't much bigger than a small town.
5.
I have always
observed that the best and worst
businesses I've dealt with, in a lifetime as a worker, customer, consultant,
and service provider of many kinds, are small town small businesses. The good
ones are better than any bigger business you might find in a larger city, but
the bad ones are awful in ways no other business could dream of being.
6.
In my
experience the reasons why some of them are the best, and the reasons why some
of them are the worst, are very often the same reasons. A small-town shoe
repair business is totally controlled by the owner, and if he really loves
fixing shoes and takes pride in it, everything about the store will be devoted
to fixing your shoes better than they've ever been fixed; but if it's the
business he hates but inherited from his father, and he wishes to god he never
had to see another fucking goddam shoe or talk to another spoiled customer who
thinks he knows what he wants fucking ever again, and goddam it the business
isn't making enough money and people are always acting like he owes them all
kinds of things when all he does is write down the order and ship them to
Taiwan for somebody there to fix ... well, your feet are not going to be happy. I love diner food and my favorite diners are
mostly in dots on the map; so are most of the places that appeared to be trying
to poison me, once the stone-cold food finally arrived in the greasy paws of
the apparently tubercular and suicidal waiter.
7.
So, I found
myself thinking, what's it mean for literature that it is being produced by
small business people working for small communities?
That was sort of seven, anyway.
Here goes on what it means .... and no promises
I'll find anything or you'll agree with me if I do.
§
"Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there’s no rock
bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or
give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a
shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then
you get yourself a couple spots on your hat and you're finished. Nobody dast
blame this man. A salesman is got to dream boy, it comes with the
territory." -- Arthur Miller, Deathof a Salesman. One of a dozen candidates for the great
American play. If you didn't read it in school, go back and kick somebody. Then
read it, or better yet, see it.
Ever
seen what happens when somebody on Yelp! says the pizza was greasy and arrived
cold at Honest Fred's New and Used Pizza in Resume Speed, West Dakota? Depending
on Honest Fred's personality, you may see abject grovelling and a promise to
pave the customer's driveway in pizza for life if he will please-please-please
just come back and give them another chance; or an immediate bombardment of
testimonials extorted from friends and relatives of Honest Fred, ("I have
been the only dentist in Resume Speed for thirty years and I do not see more
than one broken tooth per year I can attribute to Fred's pizza") or
outright sockpuppetry ("Honest Fred's Pizza is like a vision of the
divine, an anonymous archbishop"); or of course Honest Fred absolutely
losing it ("I remember you! You were the customer with the ugly wife and
the foul-mouthed nose-picking children who undertipped my daughter and left
stains on the chairs, and you better take that down or else!")
Ever
notice what happens when non-bestselling writers (and even some at the low end
of bestselling) get bad reviews, or when someone says something that might
cause somebody not to buy their books?
Well,
yes, that.
Because
the actual customer base is so small, there's a real fear that having a bad
word or phrase attached to the author -- whether it's "historically
inaccurate," "racist," "ungrammatical", "made me
feel dirty to read," or "no, just no"** — might be enough to put an end to a career, the way that a bad Yelp!
review might make just enough cars passing by on the interstate decide to go
ten miles on to the nearest Pizza Hut.
There can be an overwhelming feeling of "it's their opinion but
it's my living," and people seldom behave well when they feel powerless.
Hence the wise advice from writer-friends who have not gotten slammed lately:
ignore all reviews, learn to read any review as just an abstract bit of
marketing data, or don't read them at all. Take nothing personally.
Of
course the same writers who give that advice will need it again themselves,
probably. When the heart is pounding
with, "What if a school board bans my book because one anonymous person
said I was anti-Jesus or anti-gay or both?" it's pretty hard to remember:
one reader's opinion, read by almost no one (even if it's in a major review
outlet; the vast bulk of people who read for pleasure seldom or never read reviews).
Pretty
much every "How to Be A Real Live Writer Like Me" website, book,
seminar, etc. outside there will tell you it's important to grow a thick skin,
or just not read reviews, or work on either not caring or not knowing about the
bad things people are saying about your work.
Most of them, though, don't mention the real reason: because way down
there in the existential am-I-gonna-make-it level, anything bad said about us
or our work out in public scares the living piss out of all of us.
You
can be bitter about it like James Thurber was in "A Very ProperGander." You can try to shrug
it off like most of us do, more and less successfully. You can lose your shit all over the Intarwebz
and go after your critics like a raving nut, which we almost all hope not to
do.*** But that feeling that one fast-spreading ugly word about you can be the end
of the world never goes away.
§
All my life I'm looking for the magic
I've been looking for the magic
I've been looking for the magic
-- Dwight Twilley. NOT
a great song. You don't have to read, see, or listen to it, as far as I'm
concerned. Though I'm sure Dwight Twilley would forgive you if you did.
Is
there any of you out there who has ever really liked a really obscure writer?****
And have you ever noticed that there was something you thought was pretty
wonderful that no one else, or almost no one else, seemed to love like you did?
I
think that's the common experience of readers everywhere. There's only so much literary attention to go
around, what there is seems to be rather like a Zipf distribution; for every
Harry Potter there are ten squidzillion other boy magician stories (my
favoriteis Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Black and Blue Magic, which isn't even her best book, but I'm not much of a boy-and-magic kind of
person). Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis and
even Rosemary Sutcliff's Aquila family YAs stay in print forever and shape a
million kids' vision of ancient Rome; ForFreedom and for Gaul gathers dust on a few obscure school
library shelves, and George Finkel's Watchfiresto the North (Twilight Province
in the UK) is something you pretty much have to go to a rare book dealer for, but I can
testify that they absolutely fired my 13-year old imagination (which was going
through a serious Roman kick) every bit as much as their more famous cousins. I've had an amazingly fine
time of a sea adventure with Stephen Sheppard's For All the Tea in China, as much fun as anything Sabatini or C.S.
Forester or dare-I-say-it Patrick O'Brien ever wrote. I've spent memorable and pleasant evenings reading a fine cozy mystery
(and I usually hate cozies), AllEmergencies, Ring Super and a quirky little crime novel, Jen Sacks's Nice,
either of which would fully deserve the kind of attention that Lawrence Block
gets for Bernie Rhodenbarr or Elaine Viets for her "Dead End job"
mysteries. Just this evening, as my
spouse was looking for something historical and romantic, I handed her a copy
of Ciji Ware's Wicked Company, which is describable as "theatre history fiction"***** and which I would
figure any Diana Gabaldon fan would gobble up, but it's not even Ciji Ware's
best known book by a long stretch.
Now, aside from
causing some of you to check off a list of obscure books you've never heard of
but think sound kind of interesting, the point of that exercise is this: every
year there are some pretty damned fabulous books that roll out the publisher
doors and sink without a trace. And equally truly, every year there are some
books that for no better reason, and with no more publicity, break out and
burst onto the best seller lists—all of us in the business know something of
the history of The Hunt for Red October,
'Salem's Lot, The Godfather, Forever Amber,
Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and all the rest,
because after all hardly anyone starts out as a best-seller, but we all have dreams and we like to know it happened before and could happen again. Somehow, one
costume drama breaks out and takes over the bookshelves for a decade; one
vampire novel (at a time when the
genre was thought to be dead and staked) comes bursting out; one "desk jockey intelligence
analyst has to become a field agent" thriller storms through the
best-seller lists.
And this breeds a slightly pathetic
belief in magic among us small business owners serving small communities,
because that's the very natural response to having your life depend on
something unpredictable and just outside your control. The Jaycees decide to rent your back room for
their first-Tuesday breakfast meeting, five of them fall in love with your Farmer's Scramble, and suddenly your
restaurant is thriving. You get the Ace
franchise for a hardware store and open up the month before a major
construction project starts five miles up the road, and then a hailstorm hits
the county, and suddenly you can't keep basic tools and materials in stock; by
the time the rush is over, you're the hardware store for a fifty mile
radius. Your Just Like Home Made jams
take first prize at the county fair, and you hand out a ton of samples, and
three prominent local Ladies Who Lunch start talking them up ... any of that
can happen.
Or
your first week open, a new teenage employee posts a selfie of himself venting
his nose into your pies; or the local Wal-Mart expands its hardware section the
week before you open and beats you with prices you can't match; or you staked
it all on your brilliant huckleberry jam and the guest judge is allergic to
huckleberries.
So
the small businessperson gets out there and tries to make things happen, by
means rational and not, and because so much is out of control, can become
obsessed with almost any aspect of the business. Maybe just the right sign, maybe working just the right contact, maybe ... in a way not too different from obsessed loser guys trying to attract the pretty girl about which they know nothing, they're looking for that one thing to let her see I'm a Nice Guy.
Her? Her who?
Let's just call her the Luck Fairy.
Ever
seen a writer go berserk about awards? or about review copies? or promotional
contests or newsletters or business cards or tweets or ...
Somewhere
out there, there's the magic. Something will make it happen. Ten books ...
twenty books ... in the case of one guy I know******, 31 books .... the next one, though, that's gonna turn
it around, because it'll have the magic. You'll figure out a way to charm the
right delivery drivers, the way Jacqueline Susann did with Valley of the Dolls. You'll tell a bunch of great stories to a
publishing exec and your book will be bought without an outline, like Mario
Puzo did for The Godfather. You'll
die and your mother will lay siege to every press in America to get your
masterwork published (I don't think that was John Kennedy Toole's conscious
strategy, actually). The president of the United States will mention that he
really likes this obscure series of books about a spy named James Bond ...
So
you chase awards, or worry about whether they're fair; and you try to get
celebrities photographed holding your book; and you go to conventions and bomb
the hell out of the freebie table with clever bookmarks; and one way or
another, you do the dance of trying to attract the Luck Fairy, like the invisible Nice Guy soaked with flop sweat waiting for a chance to talk to her.
Because ... if
you court the Luck Fairy and she spurns you, at least you tried. Heck, you were
a nice guy. It wasn't fair. She didn't give you a chance.
Whereas,
if you just leave it up to her, your fate is in the hands of the most
capricious and indifferent power there is. Because nobody really knows what the Luck Fairy wants.
§
Another
thing about small town small business people: they either really know their
market or their market really doesn't have much choice, and either way can
work, and either way can be a sudden catastrophe. If, as a barber, you know every head in town,
and what would look best on it and what the most important people in that
person's life like and what the insecurities are, your continuing attention
means they'll be back, always, over and over. But if you're the only barber in
town, maybe everyone's in a mullet, because you really know how to cut mullets,
and that works too, for a while.
When
a new barber comes to town, if you're the one who knows the local market,
you're basically okay. Some people will go to the new barber, but mostly your
customers will stick with you. The new
barber will take a while to win customers over, even if he's very good, and by
that time you'll have retired or upped your game. You can even afford to be
friendly with the new guy; there's enough hair for all of you, and you can find
ways to split the market profitably, and even perhaps expand it. Maybe he knows
how to sell speciality dyes and shampoos that you don't have much experience
with, and he'll share his expertise, and you'll share your local knowledge, and
soon the town will have two good thriving barbers.
On
the other hand, if you're the mullet specialist, you're through. And you're
likely to think, for the rest of your life, that everything was fine back when
you were the Old Republic's One True Jedi Barber, until a Sith Barber came in
and stole all the business.
Which,
again, is part of why there's such a polar response to the next generation of
writers among the not-quite-has-beens-cause-we-never-was writers. Either you figure you're good at what you do
(correctly or not) and you can still find a niche, or you think the new lot are
ruining it for everyone (even if, or especially if, you were pretty good but
fashions are just changing).
§
One
of my first employers -- I swept out his shop when I was in high school -- was
a jewelry store owner who taught me a marketing secret I still treasure. "There are two mistakes you can make
with your market. One is to ignore it. The other is to suck up to it."
This
was how he explained that he always listened very carefully to what people were
asking him for, but if they were asking for something that was going to look
wrong on them -- or saddle them with too much debt -- or in general cause them
to regret their purchase eventually, he'd politely tell them it was a bad idea.
More
than once, I've been saved by a waiter who said, "Um, that's on the menu,
and I'll serve it if you want, but ...."
Years later I sold credit card services to a restaurant owner who asked
experienced waiters if they'd ever said anything like that to a customer.
"If they say they have, it's a big thing in their favor," she said.
"Naturally I tell them that if we've got anything like that on the menu I
want to hear about it. But while I'm deciding whether to keep it, change it, or
replace it, I want my waiters to be looking out for the customer experience. If
I decide they're wrong, I might tell them to say, 'Well, I just don't like ...'
or 'It's very different from ... ' so that they don't have to directly
recommend something they don't like. But
if you make someone sell something that they think sucks, they won't sell it
well, and the customer will be primed to hate it, and that does no one any
good."
That's
a small obsession of mine that I'll re-echo here: the worst thing that can
happen to a book, often, is to be sold as some other book. That's why in my
early career, when people were sticking that "next Heinlein" label on
me (and several other writers, since Heinlein had just recently died) , I
gritted my teeth a lot********. Because,
honestly, people who opened up my books were not going to find a Heinlein novel
inside, and if that was what they were looking for, they would start off
disappointed. It's also why I really
detest having a cover that is aimed to sell well but not to sell my book;
reader expectations are set by that cover and if they're not expecting what
they get, they react like the legendary man eating in a French restaurant for
the first time, who discovered snails in his escargot.
For
the most part, small stores will never be Wal-Mart, two-chair barber shops
won't become Great Clips, your little Mexican restaurant is not going to boom
into Taco Bell. And you won't be happy unless you can love that fact, unless
you'd rather be who you are and do what you do than be really, really big.
(Being happy after becoming really, really big is not anything I know jack
about. Note to Luck Fairy: I would be happy to find out). It's nothing to do with lack of ambition;
plenty of splendid writers were economically marginal their whole lives, and
are now remembered only by a few of us, despite their own best efforts. It's
just that some of us don't have the knack or luck or whatever for big success;
we're not "too different" or
"too bold" or "too ahead of our time," we just didn't
find a wide enough readership to be big. Nor were we too honest to sell out;
most big-selling writers do things that annoy their most devoted fans from time
to time, just because that's the way of writing, you can't please every reader
all the time even if you try, and trying is to do so is hard work to no
purpose.
§
Old joke: a man new to town goes into a local diner and asks what's good. Everyone, the waiters and customers,
immediately says "Always order the soup of the day here, it's the only
place with good soup in town." So of course he does. But on the first bite
he finds himself gagging and grabbing for his water glass; there's so much
pepper that he feels like he's just annoyed a policeman. The waiters summon the cook who comes out and
says, "Sir, I hear you don't like the soup. I'm really sorry. Wasn't there
enough pepper?"
Notice
that the diner's fortunes would not be improved by reducing the pepper; it's
what everyone comes there for. You've got to be willing to lose some customers
because you don't make what they want. You probably should name your place
House of Plenty Pepper, and label all the soups "... with super
pepper!", and in general let people know that's what you sell. You
definitely shouldn't let your advertising people talk you into selling them as
"mild and creamy" just because
they hear that mild and creamy is in this year. But, dammit, if you make
awesome pepper soup, make it, and do your damnedest to let all the pepper soup
lovers know that's what you make.
§
Well,
that's quite enough of that. I don't seem to have reached a conclusion. And I
don't know that I've said anything very interesting to anyone but me. But there
it is.
Was
there enough pepper? I hear the Luck Fairy really likes pepper.
§*the "micropolis," a word I've got to use in a story one of these days
**to quote from some of my own 1-stars
*** but understand painfully well when one of our friends does
****That guy in the back who just said, "Yeah, you" -- thanks, I think
*****I used it sometimes as a text when I taught theatre history; not only does it give a very accurate picture of 18th century London theatre, students actually read it
****** for radio call-in self-help, or an advice column, this would be phrased as "I have this old friend ..."
******* And I've heard from several of the others that they did too. For a while there in the 90s it was Gritfest among youngish white male SF writers
