the writing workbench
"The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs." - John Gardner
Maass Warns of Difficult Times In Commerical Publishing for the Aspiring Novelist
Today, fiction careers are biting the dust all over the place. ... What am I hearing? Mystery series cancelled after two titles. Romance writers being pushed around. Even big names on the literary scene are struggling. On the day I am writing this paragraph, the book industry columnist for The New York Times, Martin Arnold, reports that although major novels have been published this year by three of America's preeminent novelists--Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike--only one made The New York Times best-seller list and only for one week.
... even commercial best-sellers do not have much to be smug about. When I began in publishing in the late 1970s, a top paperback could net over ten million units. Today, two million is good. Big commercial fiction is getting blown off the adult best-seller lists by, of all things a book for childern, Harry Potter...
There are many macroscopic reasons for our current situation: consolidation of publishing houses, bottom-line business thinking, changes in bookselling and in the way people use their leisure time. Book prices are up; sales are down. ... At the turn of the millennium, even I must admit that our five major publishers -- HarperCollins, Penguin Putman Inc., Random House, Simon & Schuster and Time Warner -- are no longer willing to support authors with middling sales for more than a couple of books.
Getting published today is as tough as ever. Staying published is an enormous challenge.
- Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass
