White Guy Joins Substack
Sometimes the turns we take – in careers, in relationships – are only visible looking back. We turn around on this new road we’re on, see where it diverged in the yellow wood and think, “Ah, there it is.”
It’s safe to say that the ‘turn’ in my publishing career that eventually brought me to Substack was not like that. I could see it coming from a mile away.
I started publishing books in 1993 when a husband-and-wife team of agents trolling the lit mags for clients found an essay of mine in The Georgia Review. They floated the idea of turning it into a book proposal, and I rose to it like a trout to a mayfly.
Years passed, the kids grew, book followed book - all of them fought for, all of them as true as I could make them. Reviewers were kind, the books were translated into sixteen languages, I wrote essays and stories for various places, and every now and again some recognition or award would come my way.
At the same time, with the exception of a novel called The Visible World, which went through the roof in the UK, my books didn’t sell a lot of copies. It was my bad, mostly: I was a lousy salesman, and as publishers increasingly called on their authors to do the work of their publicity departments, that deficit became more and more obvious.
But the bigger problem was a catch-22 in the system. Basically, the bigger the advance on a book, the more incentivized (awful word) the publisher would be to push it, advertise it, do right by it. It made sense: if they had skin in the game, they’d be more likely to pay attention.
The flip side, which nobody really talked about, was that taking more money up front raised the risk of failure. Your book now had to sell more copies to earn back its advance, and if anything went sideways your name would grow a little asterisk. Editors took note. This was a business (the golden age of genteel publishing when an editor might publish a bodice-ripping best-seller in order to subsidize a few literary novelists was long gone), and losing money for the conglomerate that employed them made for a short walk to a pink slip.
So there I was, running from my sales record like Indiana Jones from the boulder, hoping something would happen but too stubborn to adjust my course. That I managed to stay ahead of it for thirty years is a testimonial to the editors who believed in this book or that one and stuck their necks out.
Then the publishing landscape changed. In a Pacman-parody of capitalism, publishers were gobbled up by conglomerates which were then consumed by bigger conglomerates; market forces were everything now. At the same time, reading habits changed, literature became ‘content,’ and on-line venues offering “exposure” in lieu of payment (leading to the joke, “Writer dies of exposure!”) proliferated.
When I finished my last book a year ago, a sequel to a novel called Brewster, I went the usual route and gave it to my agent, who proceeded to do what agents do.
He came back a few months later with some hard news. Not only had he been unable to sell the novel, but many editors – including some that I’d worked with before - didn’t even want to see the manuscript. We’d had our chance for 400 years, he was told, and another novel by a straight, middle-aged (ahem!) white man was not something they needed.
They weren’t entirely wrong. White men (middle-aged, cisgendered, and straight is beside the point) had ruled the roost, in publishing like everything else, pretty much forever. That much was undebatable. Whether the best answer to that historical injustice was a kind of class-action payback was another thing entirely.
I’d have been okay with being rejected because of my lousy sales record – not happy but okay.
Not getting read because of who I was felt like another thing altogether.
But let me be clear here. I’m not asking for pity, which I neither want nor deserve. Nor am I unaware of the fact that there are white, male authors like myself doing very well in traditional publishing, thank you very much, or that the current climate has opened doors for people to whom they were closed until a few decades ago, which is a good thing.
What I am saying – it bears repeating - is that not reading a book (or listening to a musician or watching a movie), because of the writer’s race, gender, age or anything else, is as absurd today as it was a century ago.
For a while I thought that like the emperor Diocletian I’d retire to the country and raise cabbages.
I took up cooking and carpentry, enjoyed them immensely.
It didn’t work. A writer needs to write. And, ideally, be read.
I’ll admit that when my daughter, Maya, first mentioned Substack, I was skeptical. Analog by nature, technologically limited by choice, I thought I’d be a bad fit.
Skepticism yielded to curiosity which gave way to something like gratitude. Here was my window, my work-around. There was something almost pure about it, a return to basics: Like a musician busking under the bridge, beholden to no one, my hat at my feet, I’d build my audience one listener at a time based on my ability to communicate something worthwhile and nothing else.
Only two months in, I’m struck most by the parallels between my old world and this new one – comparisons that often come out in favor of the new.
In the world of physical publishing, for example, everything takes ages: A piece accepted by Harper’s may be scheduled for the following fall, then pushed to the spring. Now I can just hit ‘post.’
More important to me, though, is my new ability to communicate with readers.
I always enjoyed reading the “Letters to the Editor” section of the publications I wrote for, but I’d have to wait for months. Now readers can respond the same day, the same hour, and if all of that sounds terribly obvious, well, it feels like a bit of a miracle to me.
It’s not all daffodils and sunsets: I know Substack isn’t a utopia, and I’m unlikely to catch the great, flapping ear of the algorithm, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken.
What I like is the clarity: What I get right, I get right; what I don’t is on me.
To quote my favorite line from an old Robert Redford and Jane Fonda movie, Electric Horseman, “I’m nobody’s story but my own now.”
Of course, Fonda’s response is, “Boy, do you have that wrong.”
I guess we’ll see.
The traditional media have all gone full zombie. At least as far as “publishing” goes anyway. It's both stunning and disturbing.
The business term is Walking Dead. Traditional audio, video, text, all gone zombie. The eyes are still open and the aimless wandering has begun.
Attacked by digital pirates from the outside while simultaneously imploding on the inside from righteous self loathing, these are devastating (but disconnected) encirclement and infiltration maneuvers.
Are we now in a world where the material speaks for itself? The solo voice era? The artist king? Maybe. I'm not that optimistic. But if so, how does that even work? Either way, it's clear that this vehicle has no reverse gear.
Glad I read that though the big picture is it makes me sad. Or, if I shift my thinking, it just makes me happy you’re on substack, glad I shoved off my adamant anti social-media to find substack and…. Too much to list. If nothing else, I’m going to look up your book.