Literary Gate Keepers

This actually came out in last week’s Time Out New York, but Michael Miller’s piece on how a book goes from writer to reader is pretty interesting and touches on some of the knotty issues surrounding publication and publicity.

Miller briefly hits on the various gate keepers of book culture: agents, editors, critics.

It really is insane to think about all that goes into making a single book “take off.” Especially when you consider that over 250,000 books are published a year—over 12,000 of which are works of fiction and poetry. Throw in there that the average American (according to the NEA) reads about 4 books a year and it seems almost impossible that any book (especially a work of literary fiction) rises above the fray. (Conversely, the idea that 250,000 books are published seems equally crazy. It’s as if any off-the-wall proposal can find a publisher out there.)

It would take tomes to fully explore and explain this issue, but Miller gets some good quotes/viewpoints into his piece, especially from Lorin Stein and Ira Silverberg:

Ira Silverberg, an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic who represents Sam Lipsyte, Christopher Sorrentino and Rene Steinke, puts it another way: “We are the first line of defense—we keep it safe to read in America, because most of the stuff that people write is shit.”

We generally don’t work with many agents for Open Letter titles. (Of our first 14 acquisitions, 5 were agented.) Most of the time we work with foreign publishers or the author him/herself. The fact that the book was published elsewhere takes the place of the vetting process that agents serve for American writers. (Still, there’s a lot of dreck out there . . .)

Questing for great books to publish is frequently considered the “fun part” of publishing (for Christ’s sake, I get to go to Buenos Aires in a couple weeks to meet editors and authors and to immerse myself in the culture of Argentina . . . Does it get any better than that?) The part of this process that most fascinates me is actually the end result—finding a way to get people to pick up a particular book and spend their cash and time to read it.

Once a book is printed, it reaches a new and complex series of gatekeepers—namely the media, blogs, bookstores and readers themselves. Most publicists confer that no one thing can make an author a household name. Almost everyone agrees that a long interview on NPR’s Fresh Air can be a huge boost (one industry insider said that “Terry Gross blows [New York Times reviewer] Michiko Kakutani out of the water”), but that selling books requires a tricky mix of review attention, bookseller enthusiasm and word-of-mouth praise.

That uncertainty is what I find incredibly enjoyable about publishing. That and seeing someone reading a book you acquired/published on the subway . . .