If the aspiring writers of the computer age feel that their greatest enemies are the people who sit in judgment of whether they will be published or not, they can find a solidarity in misery with all of their fellow scribblers going back to the days when styluses were pressed into clay to make cuneiform tablets. Yet with talent, savvy and the determination to press on with what “has always been a difficult and uphill struggle”, getting published is a doable task. And we have it from someone who has spent more than half a century negotiating the difficult terrain on both sides of the writer/publisher gap.
Michael Korda, the county resident whose experiences in the field have ranged from a long stint as editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, during which he published authors as diverse as Henry Kissinger, Will and Ariel Durant, Ronald Reagan, and Jacqueline Susan, to his own authoring of novels, memoirs, histories, biographies and paeans to cats and horses, tried to put that seemingly unbridgeable gulf in perspective during a lecture at the James and Betty Hall Theatre at Dutchess Community College on Thursday, March 27.
Titled “The Publishing World and You,” the talk explored the history, dynamics and prospects of the industry while providing common sense advice about a domain he assures is not as intractable as it appears.
“Book publishers have not had over the centuries as bad a reputation as lawyers, but they come close,” he told his audience amidst audible chuckles. “They have never been popular. Yet publishing is a two-way street. When writers get together, they complain about their publishers; when publishers get together, they complain about their writers. And the truth is that nothing much changes in book publishing despite all the moans and groans about the death of the printed word.”
To illustrate, Korda ran through a gamut of historical examples. He cited a letter from the Roman Emperor Claudius, who was, among other things, the author of a history of Carthage, to his publisher, complaining that copies of his books were unavailable when his friends went to buy them, or that the slaves who copied them in that long-before-Guttenberg era had made numerous mistakes.
“Did the publisher realize how hard the emperor had worked on his book, and how heartbroken he was over these difficulties?” Korda paraphrased the imperial historian’s lament. “Claudius was experiencing the same difficulties with publishers that writers do today.”
And the author/publisher cited a memorable anecdote from the life of the poet Lord Byron to show just how hot the resultant passions can get.
At a gathering of British writers held to discuss the problem of copyrights during the Napoleonic Wars, not long after the French emperor had caused a German publisher to be shot for printing pamphlets which attacked him and his policies, Byron was so bold as to rise and propose a toast “To Napoleon Bonaparte.” First silence, then angry hissing greeted this public praising of Britain’s existential enemy. But Byron overcame it handily.
“Gentlemen, it is true that Bonaparte is the scourge of mankind and the enemy of freedom,” Byron answered. “But I beg you never to forget, he shot a publisher!” The assembled writers broke out into raucous applause.
Then Korda told of an incident which occurred in a speakeasy during Prohibition between the novelist Theodore Dreiser and his publisher, Horace Liveright, in order to show that publishers have it tough too.
Liveright had gone to the illegal watering hole together with the young editor Bennett Cerf to tell Dreiser that he had sold the rights to his novel “An American Tragedy” to Hollywood for $100,000, a princely sum in those days. But when Liveright informed the author that he would take a modest 10 percent commission out of this for his labors, Dreiser threw his drink in the editor’s face and stormed out in a fury.
Liveright then turned to Cerf and said, “Never trust an author!”
Practical steps can yield results
Yet as Korda explained, there are straight lines of practicality that run through all of these tumultuous emotions.
“Much of book publishing is a reprise; readers know what they want, not something new,” he affirmed. “And what people want is a good story, or a book that tells them something they don’t know. Some people are just born writers, but stylistic excellence is not everything. Books have been written by people who have poor command of the English language, but who have something terribly important to say, and manage to somehow get it down.”
As for getting it out, Korda points out that a writer needs to start with a common-sense strategy.
“Aspiring writers should read “Publisher’s Weekly” carefully over a number of months,” he said.
“That will give you a sense of what publishing houses are publishing what kinds of books. For instance, the vast bulk of what is addressed to me personally is totally inappropriate to me – I don’t want to slog through a 3,000 word biblical epic. If I had written a Civil War novel, I would try and find the person who edited “Cold Mountain,” and send it to them. You must diligently research book publishing, as you would a company you want to buy stock in.”
Noting that agents are harder to reach than editors, because the latter work for companies with large staffs while the former often share an assistant, Korda denounced as a myth the idea that publishing is a cronyistic field utterly closed to outsiders.
“People complain that nobody new ever makes the New York Times Bestseller List, yet every time I look at it, it is filled with names I’ve never seen before, in fiction and nonfiction.”
Speaking to the Beat after his talk, Korda addressed the question of why books continue to defy predictions of their demise in an age of video and other electronic media.
“It may be an age of video, but what people are doing on the Internet is no different than 18th century letter-writing. When people ask me, ‘Will e-books replace printed books?’, I answer, ‘Who cares ?’ It’s what’s in the book that counts. Perhaps the printed book will go the way of cuneiform and printed scrolls, but I don’t think so. As a compact and digestible piece of information, it is unequalled.”