A story I tell often comes from when I was selected to present at the Chippewa Valley Book Festival for my Rhemalda Publishing release, ‘Beyond Birkie Fever‘. This was a fairly prestigious event, I was paid a fee to go and speak, and was invited to attend several presentations, and was a featured guest at the closing dinner.
At one of the events, I remember sitting by a woman who was also a featured author. The second I sat down, she regarded me with a sneer of contempt that clearly indicated she felt that I had no right to be there. Being a well-educated person, I decided to overlook her attitude and engage in polite conversation. I’d barely opened my mouth, when she hit me with the following:
“Well, are you making enough from writing so that you don’t have to hold a job?”
I thought it was a strange question for someone to ask within the first few minutes of having met them. Now, this woman wasn’t a famous author by any means. I don’t remember who she was, or who her publisher was. I answered that I owned a business, and that I was always on the lookout to make more cash either by teaching, freelance writing, freelance graphic design, translation, or anything. She kind of scoffed and turned away from me. I was kind of blindsided by the attitude because I’d been accepted to the festival and I, too, had a publisher, so I don’t know what there was to make her believe that she was on some other stratosphere of literary achievement than I was. At no point did any evaluation of actual writing take place.
And therein lies the first misconception: Your skills as a writer are not generally evaluated by your actual writing.
The more time I spend writing, the more I’m baffled by the insane misconceptions that exist about writers. Writing is a job just like any other job. There is a large group of people out there who are much happier to complete a manuscript and leave it collecting dust in a drawer than spending any effort to find some way, any way, to get it out in to the hands of the general public. Sure, you might get a book out there that will never find an audience, but if you leave your manuscript in a drawer, then not finding an audience is a a guarantee.
If you go into writer’s forums online (not recommended), you always see people throwing about absolutely insane numbers. “Well, I wouldn’t sign a contract for less than 6 figures.” This is from a person who has never even had an article accepted for publication by a local magazine, and they think they’re going to get a 6 figure salary for their first novel. Where does this insanity come from? Also, why aren’t there more publishing houses that offer a thousand dollar advance, or five thousand dollars? Why is the number either zero, or 100,000? It almost strikes me as if the whole enterprise is artificially created.
There is a mistaken belief that if you write something good, it will find an audience. All things being equal, that might be the case. However, the reality is that there is an extreme effort out there to put some works in front of your eyes and push others aside. Don’t scoff, this is just basic marketing, but you have to accept the reality of what basic marketing means. Most media conglomerates are owned by the same companies that also produce magazines and novels, so there really is no incentive out there to seek out the best work that’s released in a given year. Why would they do that? The only thing that could possibly happen is that some unknown writer begins making a ton of money on characters s/he owns instead of a massive media conglomerate. Sure, that might be “fair” but that’s not how the world works.
A few years back, I had an article go viral and receive a quarter of a million views in just a couple weeks. This was nothing more than a letter to the editor that I’d sent in to the local paper which happened to strike a chord. Now, I know from my own web pages, that when an article generates that many views, the result is about a thousand dollars of income for the platform in advertising. This estimation is based on Google Adsense, other platforms might vary.
So, if the standard laws of business applied, you’d think the paper would have reached out to me for a follow up article as soon as possible. Clearly, if you have a popular story, you immediately publish a new story and link it to the one getting attention in order to keep the audience engaged with the platform. Anticipating this, I wrote a follow up and sent it to the paper.
“We’re sorry,” they replied, “but we can only accept one story per author in any 30 day cycle.” The response made no logical or business sense, and it made even less sense when they revealed a month later that my article was the most read article for that newspaper in that year. If you’ve been wondering why newspapers are failing, it’s because they don’t bother to obey the laws of common sense.
The concept of meritorious recognition for outstanding works of literature simply doesn’t exist as there currently isn’t a platform to evaluate the mass of releases that come out in a given year. People point to things like Kirkus reviews, but the fact is, Kirkus is no longer a legitimate review source. Sure, they take a huge amount of money to write reviews, but their business model changed about 25 years ago, and they’re no longer making any headway into discovering new voices.
There is a deeply rooted thread of arrogance in the literary community, and the woman I met at the Chippewa Valley Book Festival exemplified that. The absolute last people you approach about an evaluation of any literary work is anyone who has any kind of degree in literature. Part of their training is to dismiss most works as “not worthy of study,” which is one of the most bigoted and prejudiced statements I can imagine-and totally in conflict with what I believe should be the ideal of studying literature.
I had a friend in college who did his Master’s thesis on Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ only to be told that the book wasn’t quite worthy of literary study. Even a professor friend of mine expressed concern when he elected to teach a class on ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ ‘Dune’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ have both had a tremendous cultural effect, and the idea that they are somehow less worthy is absurd.
What’s even more absurd, and prejudicial, is how a framework exists to almost instantly weed out and dismiss voices of low socioeconomic background. The fact is, there are some absolutely fantastic storytellers out there who haven’t had access to a good education. I’ve listened to spoken word recordings of individuals who have lived amazing lives, and who can recount heart-breaking episodes of their lives with unmatched compassion and wisdom. That these people might produce a piece of writing with grammatical errors, does not undermine the power and importance of their narratives.
It should also be noted, nobody has a problem when a person with an ivy league education sits down with one of these ‘poverty level’ voices and then polishes up the work only to publish it as their own. As long as the literary merits are retained among the pre-determined literary elites, there is no scandal. The concept of the wrongness of cultural appropriation somehow hasn’t made its way to literature yet-that’s still a rich person’s world. I believe we have a duty to study the words of writers whose works are not controlled by major media conglomerates.
The image at the top of this article is from the inside cover of Ballantine’s 1985 printing of ‘The Hobbit’ (the thirteenth printing). It contains an error on the first page where the word ‘They’ is printed as ‘Hhey.’ Now, if this were a small press, or self-published book by a writer of low socioeconomic background, that typo, in the minds of many reviewers would justify a 1 star review.
Any new book, no matter who the publisher, is going to have around a dozen minor errors in the pages. That’s just a fact of writing, and anyone who is involved with writing should be aware of that fact. However, in the current environment, reviewers scour books from smaller publishers looking for common grammatical errors just so they can leave damaging reviews. This is a far more common point of concern than any evaluation of the actual writing itself-and it’s really just a tactic for dismissing new voices who the literary community has deemed ‘not worthy of literary study.’
What I find comical is that there are thousands of students currently studying literature worldwide who, through their current course work, make absolutely no contribution to collective world literature. Why shouldn’t some time of each student’s college career be spent evaluating the work of emerging writers in the hope of giving a true evaluation to someone who might actually have a compelling story to tell?
The concept of “literary giants,” or the “single voice of a generation” is somewhat problematic, because the truth is there are many, many writers out there with sufficient talent to produce fantastic writing. The evidence of this can be seen by the fact that often, when reading an article on-line, no matter what the publication, the best writing is generally found in the comments (particularly the trolling comments-that nevertheless do represent literary ability, and are often quite clever). That the literary community likes to believe in the “emergence of a single literary giant” is a mistake, because they then all want to be that giant. Furthermore, it makes scholars of literature reluctant to praise anyone but themselves, because that would burst their personal illusion of greatness (someday somebody will 
discover that dusty manuscript in my drawer-and then they’ll see). Often, if you even make an astute observation around a literature student or professor, s/he just goes silent as if to try and make themselves forget the words were said, in the hope that they can then claim ownership of them later.
I walked into a Barnes and Noble the other day and was astounded by the fact that every book on the front display table was either a movie novelization, or the idiotic memoir of a pseudo-celebrity famous for having done absolutely nothing. Where are the ideas? Where are the INTERESTING books? Why doesn’t anyone in the literary community have any wish to SEEK THEM OUT!!! Why don’t they recognize this is a problem.
So, my solution has been simple. I read a lot of other new writers. I review them. I try to point them out to other people. I wish more people would do this, particularly people with degrees in English. The whole reason I studied literature was for the exposure to great writers I might not have otherwise discovered. I was crushed when I didn’t find any new, interesting writers during the course of my studies. I have found some interesting voices reading independent and small press literature. However, I find the authors from the large presses generally aren’t worthy of study.
To grab a copy of my most recent release, click below. I guarantee it will be more thought provoking than the memoir of a thirty year old who got famous for shooting videos of his feet and posting them on YouTube:
