Chin Music Press - Adventures in Publishing

What we're up against

Today I asked a well-known bookstore to host a reading for our next book, a novel called Last of the Red Hot Poppas, which will be out in September. The store's quick, polite rejection tells a lot about what we're up against. Here's an excerpt:

I am sorry, but there is no way that we can schedule a reading by an unknown novelist at the store in the fall ... It is very, very difficult to do fiction here unless the person is a name brand. Even for fairly well known fiction writers, we get, if we are lucky, twenty people not related to the author.

Fair enough. I understand their position. To be honest, I don't even care, because somewhere deep inside of me I know that going about this whole publishing business in the same way that the big New York firms do — spend loads on marketing, sign brand-name writers, do six-week book tours, etc. — is both demeaning and suicidal. The reason we got into this industry in the first place was to exploit the blind spots of an industry grown obese with bad books and sloppy distribution policies, not to imitate the biggest players.

I wonder if I will live to see our society rebel against the stranglehold of marketing. There are signs that people are waking up to the phoniness of it all, but those signs are few and far between. Mark Crispin Miller said something along the lines that the US media is in some ways more totalitarian than the Soviet Union's media ever was because we Americans believe the news that is fed to us. The Russians were not as easily fooled. And we believe the marketing departments of the world to the point where all our decisions are made for us. We're sorry, but we can't do this or that because you haven't marketed your product well enough, you haven't made us aware of yourself before we received your call. Now if you had been on Oprah, we could talk.

And these are independent bookstore owners who think this way.

Most large independent booksellers have come to a point where they can't take chances. Their speaking lineup is dictated by the biggest publishers, the biggest names. So we must find smaller, more courageous bookstores and work with them. When we find those sorts of stores — Book Buffs in Denver, BookWoman in Austin, Mac's Backs in Cleveland — the connection is immediate and long lasting, and I am reminded why I dove into this crazy venture.

Bruce Rutledge >> June 19, 2006

Comments

Well, at least you received a response. Think of it this way, there are entire cities, not just a single bookstore, that don't attract or invite the big name writers, much less emerging writers, the way literate cities such as Seattle, Boston, NYC, San Francisco can. Dallas seems to be one of them as so many pass through only to catch a connecting flight.

Steve Quinn at June 20, 2006 08:10 AM

Good point. And I understand the bookstore's decision. But if bookstores don't make room for companies like Chin Music, then there will be a lot more Dallases, I'm afraid.

The bookstore I quoted gets points for responding. More typical is no response, no return call, at all. So, I give them credit. But not as much credit as I give to the stores willing to take a chance from time to time.

Bruce at June 20, 2006 03:14 PM