Fiction publishing goes by the numbers. Big publishers want books that will appeal to the largest number of people. When considering what to publish, they have a big pool to choose from. So, it’s usually arbitrary which few of those millions who submitted their work get selected to be marketed toward the millions at the reading end.
There are so many mediocre readers out there that a lot of mediocre books could get published and do well enough to break even. But that wouldn’t be economically efficient for publishers. They want a bottle neck: they want very few books to be successful. They want everybody reading the same thing. This saves on marketing costs.
If you think the capitalist model of publishing mirrors the Darwin’s model of natural selection, you would be right. But there is a great deal of misconception about selection for reproductive fitness.
In economics, as well as in nature, the most common forms tend to survive the selection processes to have greater reproductive fitness. Nature and capitalism are not, contrary to popular misconceptions, geared toward fitness optimization. They are geared toward getting by. Publishers want to survive in the economic realm. They also want to put their competitors out of business, further reducing the options available to the public.
In addition to being a literary fiction novelist, I am also an evolutionary theorist.
The notion that the best survive is something of a fallacy. Natural selection can only work well in very small, isolated populations. The truth is that, in a big pool, the most common and the ones that got there first tend to survive to reproduce more. This is called the Matthew Effect, for Matthew 25:29 “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”
The traditional publishing industry is a coarse-grained filter that eliminates most of the garbage, selects mostly good-ish writing, and eliminates most of the radically new works of genius. This image of a Gaussian distribution shows the middle hump of okayness making up around ninety-five percent of books and the outlying tails of extraordinarily bad and extraordinarily good together making up less than five percent of books published.
The review industry is a second filter that again eliminates most of the worst and best works, and selects the middling ones.
The majority of readers come next selecting again for mediocrity.
In general, mediocrity is the natural tendency of all things. This isn’t a judgment. This is a statistical fact. There are always more middle readers than tail readers.
To make the situation even worse, people tend to be interested in what is similar to what they already know. This puts even more squeeze on the unique.
The literary award system used to be a good way to find those good books. But big publishers can’t afford to let little literary publishers occupy that valuable marketing real estate. Literary agents and publishers used to joke: Want to make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a big one. Now, no joke, Want to make a fortune in publishing? Publish only mediocre books. It’s business after all, not charity.
We need filters, but we need to seek ways to improve them. Tail readers need to find tail writers and vice versa. We need better defined fine-grained filters.
I have been associated with two sources for finding good books, Dactyl Review and The Strange Recital.
If you know of more ways to find good books, leave a comment below.
What an author can do is buy up all the used copies, which are sometimes priced as low as a penny, and resell them at a higher price. I have tried my hand at this, but I make a lousy bookseller. I refuse to bubblewrap, doublebox or otherwise over-package books the way Amazon does (they seem to think books are potentially able to explode if jostled in the post), and I don’t get orders in the mail very quickly. Although it might be of some benefit, I’m not too keen on spending a lot of energy learning how to be a bookseller as well as a writer. Gone are the days when some publishing-house intern with nothing better to do took care of things for the pampered writer. These days most authors, be they with small or large publishers, have to do a lot of their own PR, dealing personally with book stores and reading groups. I don’t want the added responsibility of resale management.