Hot garlic on a cold winter’s night

There is a fair amount of – understandable – authorial concern about what publishers actually want.

Do they just want to follow the same-again-but-slightly-different formula? So if werewolves and vampires are all the rage, are publishers cynical enough simply to want a same-again W + V story but with a twist (set in an Inuit village, set in Edwardian London, told through the voice of a were-druid)?

Or are publishers more Zen than that? Do they wait with an open mind, not asking or expecting anything from the next manuscript they open, just waiting to see if this new tale feels new and amazing and just insistent on being published?

Because there’s reasonable support for both hypotheses, you’ll see plenty of online chat amongst writers debating this question.

But the answer is simple, and encouraging. It’s simply this: publishers operate in both ways. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that nearly all publishers operate in both ways pretty much all the time.

First, the cookie-cutter approach.

Yes, publishers like making money and they’re not complete idiots.

So if they notice were-books selling like hot garlic on a full-moon night, they will naturally want to get their hands on were-books. They’ll operate in precisely the way I’ve just described, applying a two-stage test:

1. Does this book involve werewolves and vampires?
2. If so, does it do so in a way that moves the boundary forward in some way? Does this book promise to seem fresh to a reader who’s already deeply steeped in the genre?

That second question is a complex one, because agents can’t determine the answer in light of books that have already been published. If your book gets taken on by an agent now, it may be 12-18 months before it’s available for sale. So really agents are reading the submissions pile. They’re talking to editors about what they’re acquiring right now. They’re trying to judge from that evidence what will feel fresh in a year or so’s time.

Because agents have access to a much wider data pool than you do, they’re well-equipped to answer that question in a way that you’re not. And – tough. There’s no workaround, except knowing your genre and writing at what you take to be its leading edge.

There are times of publishing frenzy when this cookie cutter approach works with an insane intensity. That was true of vampire-lit. It was true of misery-memoirs. It was most astonishingly (but briefly) true of spanking novels, in the wake of 50 Shades Of Grey.

But most genres operate like this, at lower pressure, all the time. A crime editor needs to buy crime books. He or she simply won’t find a dozen astonishing novels a year, so they’ll be perfectly content to buy on the same-but-different basis. And that makes life easy. Cover designers know what kind of designs to use. Marketers know what approach they need to use. Publicists know what doors to knock on. And so on.

All that said, no one has ever entered into the books trade in order to pursue a same-but-different approach. It just never happens.

If you hang around with publishers (at glorious festivals like ours, for example), you’ll hear them talk repeatedly about passion. They all claim that theirs is an industry driven by passion, and it really is. You could work in a vinyl flooring business and have no strong feelings at all about the stuff you make and sell. That is never, ever true of publishing – not at any level, or in any firm.

So, publishers do buy cookie-cutter books and they do so all the time and without any sense of shame and they’re perfectly right to do just that.

But they also buy the bolts-from-the-blue, the lightning-strikes, the black swans. Lincoln in the Bardo and Twilight and Gone Girl and Where the Crawdads Sing, and any number of other books that looked at what everyone else was writing and just said, “Yeah, don’t care.”

Now, it’s also true that publishers have to operate under the shadow of the spreadsheet, the invisible maths of profit and loss.

Some editors, faced with something astonishing, will have a failure of faith. Roughly, “Yes, I liked this, but can I get a minimum of 10-25,000 people to think the same way? I’m not sure. This is weird.”

But phooey. Some people are cowards. There are plenty of publishers out there. There are, in fact, for any genre, easily enough editors at easily enough imprints that a really good book will find its home.

Here’s a story from film (the quote comes from this Guardian article):

As Six Feet Under producer and director Alan Poul recalls: “The story is that they did a focus group with The Sopranos pilot and it got horrendous reactions. It was one of the lowest-testing focus group scores ever – people just couldn’t understand the idea of this protagonist who wasn’t super-handsome. Chris [Albrecht from HBO] was faced with the choice of tinkering with it or just putting it on as it was. And he went with the latter. That single decision changed the face of television.”

As a group, publishing is more like HBO than not. It’ll take a risk.

In television, that kind of gutsiness is difficult and rare – because budgets are big, schedules are small, and failures matter.

In publishing? None of that’s true. Budgets are piffling. Books are abundant. Failures are so common that it’s the successes which are genuinely unusual.

From the same article, HBO’s current CEO says:

“To this day, we don’t test things,” he says. “We don’t do research about what sorts of shows we should make or what talent we should work with. It’s never been something that HBO has relied on. For me, it’s just been: ‘Is this a good show? Do we like it? Does it feel different?’”

In TV, that’s so unusual, they write articles about it. In publishing, it’s completely standard. No one ever tests. They do conduct research, yes, but (in my sense at least) that’s more because research is something that big corporates feel they have to do. I think the impact of that research is marginal at best. In the end, an editor’s judgement matters more.

The moral for you?

Don’t worry about it. Don’t sweat it. Immerse yourself in your genre, yes. (And if you don’t have a clear genre, just immerse yourself in the kind of books you like. Read lots. Read intelligently.)

After that, just write the story that grips you. Let that character invade your head. Find the voice. Believe in it. Write really well. (Craft matters hugely. It’s key.)

In the end, it just doesn’t matter much whether your book is another cookie from the same mould (but with interesting differences from the last one) or whether it’s genuinely, startlingly different. Both books – if they’re good enough – will find a home.

Publishing is a capacious industry. Its appetite is omnivorous.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Keeping it simple

Plain vanilla this week, folks. Just give us a passage – 250-300 words, plus a little context – and we’ll give you the best feedback we’ve got. Both barrels of it.

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Til soon.

Harry