Publishing: The Insular, Professional Reading Class

This is purely hypothesis, but…

Perhaps there are a few lessons the publishing industry should learn from the book by Delia Owens titled Where the Crawdads Sing.

First, I have not yet read the book. I will, but I resisted it initially because the title seems so incredibly cliché that I expected the book to be treacly in its nostalgia and sentimentality. There are many great Southern books, of course, but there are many more that rest on sentimentality rather than story and connection, to the point that they become difficult to read, especially if you have real, bickering, loving, sometimes crazy Southern relatives.

Perhaps Owens book is treacle but given it’s sold more than 4 million copies it could be a well-crafted narrative. Again, I will read it.

But recently I read the New York Times discussing the books popularity, which was filled with phrases such as:

1. Industry analysts have struggled to explain the novel’s staying power…

2. This book has defied the new laws of gravity…

3. Surprise breakout hits have become increasingly rare…

4. One of the most surprising things about the success of “Crawdads” is that sales began to accelerate months after it came out — an anomaly in publishing, where sales typically peak just after publication, aided by the initial advertising and marketing around a title…

5. I’ve never seen anything like this in 30 years…

6. Industry analysts have struggled to explain the novel’s staying power, particularly at a moment when fiction sales over all are flagging, and most blockbuster novels drop off the best-seller list after a few weeks.

Well. Hmmm…

Again, the success of this book should be a proof to publishers and agents that perhaps something is broken with the publishing model that could not only be easily fixed, but perhaps lead to a new resurgence of profitability for a wider range of titles and authors.

For so long the world of publishing has sought magic formulas and placed purity tests on authors. Some have faded and some remain but the two examples that come to mind are weeding out non-MFA holding authors and only seeking authors with large platforms.

What about authors who simply write a good book that’s a great read? Well, agents and editors at publishing houses will say that’s always what they are looking for and use their own and that of their assistant’s insight and experience to identify those books. And yet, the success of fiction titles is dropping precipitously even though books like Crawdads and others have shown there is a huge appetite for reading fiction that connects with a reader.

Adding to the purity test issue—and I believe this is the bigger issue—is that the current model for how a book goes from query to publication has a major design flaw that affects not just agents and large publishing houses but independents as well.

Perhaps they’ve created an insular class of professional readers that is disconnected from actual readers.

And, this professional class of readers—the folks that make decisions on pass or send the manuscript further down the line—make evaluations as they read hundreds of titles each month, come from an insular cultural milieu, and a specific geographic location.

These readers also work within an employee hierarchy where they have to prove themselves to their bosses, who occupy an even more insular cultural ecosystem.

It seems that actual readers and what they connect with are left out of the process.

For example, I’ve made it a point to read well-reviewed books according to the New York Times, Lit Hub, and a couple other outlets. And most of the time I’m fairly disappointed. Yes, they are well written—though the writing often lacks texture (read Woodson’s Red at the Bone and then Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and you’ll see what I mean)—but they are too of academia in how they read.

It’s like being told that one piece of music is great jazz, but it came out of Berklee rather than something like Salt Peanuts or So What or some other songs that came out of experience and life and a real desire to speak. It’s intellectualism versus gut.

So, it seems that perhaps spending a little money to get manuscripts out of the house and in the hands of a sampling of real readers could help. Maybe the first read—the slush pile screeners—should be a network of folks you pay $50 to read?

Maybe this is unfeasible—or even dumb—but there must be a way to connect the head and heart and identify titles that people will love. And then with more profits, publishers could take greater risks.