The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part one. Publishers vs. Kindle

I have frequently written on this blog about my non-fiction publications. But I have also written a huge amount of fiction. My fiction would be very hard to sell to commercial publishers, because I have so much science in them. That is exactly the reason that readers of this blog would like them, and commercial publishers would not.

I am no amateur in fiction writing. I have been writing fiction for decades, often rewriting the same story or novel over and over until I get it as good as it can be. In the process, I have removed whole chunks of text that I originally thought were really good but which I admitted would not advance the plot and might, however well written, cause the reader to give up.

But I have almost no fiction publications—just in a couple of minor literary journals that no longer exist. I have earned a grand total of $25, which I sent to a writer and environmentalist who, unlike me, had no steady employment. So the question arose, decades ago, how should I publish my fiction?

The days of submitting manuscripts “over the transom” ended decades ago. Now, to approach an editor of even a small press, you have to be represented by an agent. When I started writing fiction, agents were actual people, and they sent me personal responses. But now, the prospective fiction writer seldom gets any response whatsoever, and if so, it is a form letter. I now have the suspicion, in the modern age of artificial intelligence, that agents almost never read submissions, because they already know what they are going to send to publishers: the works written by their friends, themselves under a different name, or by an AI program they have installed. They claim to be looking for new talent, but I simply do not believe it. In fact, agents may actually themselves be artificial intelligences. They may have their photos on the agency website, but they may not be actual people. An agency can leave the entire process—choosing which manuscripts, if any, to represent, and then sending them to editors—to artificial intelligence. I have encountered a grand total of about five agents out of hundreds who have given personal responses that indicate that they are human. An AI bot can write fiction that is as marketable as that written by most human authors. I guess what I am saying is that getting a fiction agent for a commercial publisher is practically impossible. I have been told this by many authors—you know, the ones that spend their time and money going to writers’ conferences.

For many years, an attractive alternative has been to self-publish on Amazon. Gone are the days of vanity presses, where the author pays for a few hundred copies of the book to be printed, and then the author has to figure out what to do with them. These are the days of Amazon, in two ways:

First, no commercial publisher can afford to do “print-on-demand,” because there has to be a minimum print run of at least a thousand books each day to justify the costs of printing. But Amazon can do it, because they sell so many books. It does not have to be a thousand copies of the same book. Print-on-demand is one of the Amazon options. If just one person wants your book, they can get it.

Second, e-books cost very little to produce. A Kindle book can be produced and sent to customers with very little cost, except for maintaining the servers. Once again, if just one person wants your e-book, they can get it.

Kindle publishing is rather clumsy. If it is just text, as in most novels, it works fine. But I have never seen a really satisfactory illustration in a Kindle book. It usually ends up really small and illegible.

The advantages of Kindle books are astonishing. The software, at least now, is relatively simple. You provide a cover illustration (just the front cover), a document with the whole book in it, financial information, the jacket blurb (which will show up on the Amazon site), etc. You can do it all yourself. If you mess something up, you will get an email telling you what to fix. The best part might be that the author gets to keep 70 percent of the money. In contrast, a commercial publisher offers 10 percent, which must be split with an agent. This would mean an author gets 8 percent. A hundred books (@$5.00) generates $500, of which the author gets to keep $350. From a commercial publisher, you would get $40.

Now, for the ecology of book publishing. It is like a tree or bush disseminating its seeds. There are lots of ways of doing this. A tree could produce a few, large seeds, inside of fruits that animals want to eat; or a lot of small seeds, that blow away in the wind. Wild plant species use both options, just like a writer could use the agent/publisher option or the Amazon option. There is, in the world of publishing just as in seed dispersal, no single correct way of doing it. I spent decades on the agent/publisher route, and am now ready to try the Kindle route. My first Kindle novel just came out today.

What you don’t want to do is to publish online and then ignore all publicity. Fruits and seeds dispersed by animals put a lot of expenditure into publicity—that is, into attracting animals to disperse them. Publicity—that’s what the next essays are about.

Non-Linear Success

Nature is full of non-linear processes; in fact, nearly everything in nature is non-linear. It occurred to me recently that one of the most non-linear processes is evolutionary fitness or, in more general terms, the success of any endeavor.

It is conceivable that some perennial plants have a more or less constant (linear) number of successful offspring each year. But often all of the seeds that a plant produces in any given year (which, for an annual, is its whole life) die. And then once in a while there is a bonanza year, in which dozens or even hundreds of seedlings germinate in a lucky location, perhaps after a fire or other disturbance. There is more to the story, but my point is that if that plant were to use its past average annual success rate as a gauge of its future success, it would get pretty depressed.

Of course, this applies to animals as well, and to everything we do. Right now I am seeking a literary agent to represent my new book projects. As you can guess, I have not yet had success. But I refuse to be content with the four books I have already published (see my website for information) and project this zero success rate into the future. All the rejections have been unnecessarily polite. But I do not know whether to believe that this is each agency’s boilerplate rejection, or if they actually made positive comments about my work. How can I know?

But one thing is abundantly clear from these “I am going to pass on this project” letters. As one of them said in italics, opinions of agents vary considerably for any one project. Agents can only represent the books that, for any reason or no reason, capture their enthusiasm. They simply cannot represent every worthy book, and they say so. If I were an agent, I would not represent a novel based on sports, even if it were the best novel in the world. That’s just me.

So I continue to send out query letters, my equivalent of seeds, believing that once I find an agent, it will not matter how many I do not find. And one success opens the door to others. So at the moment I refuse to conclude that my endeavor is likely to fail (especially since my failure rate is currently only 20 percent). Meanwhile, I have to keep the numbers up. That’s what a plant would do.