youhavetobekidding

Up until now, I’ve only been picking on Hollywood–but being an equal opportunity offender, I think it’s time the Gal from the Flyover takes on the Big Machine on the East Coast.

After all, my personal experience is in publishing.

I published fourteen novels through that machine. To be fair, I was paid very well and my novels were given excellent advertising and publicity. The problem was, as it is now, that the large publishing houses have all been taken over by conglomerates. Book publishing, once upon a time, was about nurturing talent and publishing good books. Now, it’s all about the bottom line.

Which is why a lot of people stopped reading and turned to TV and movies for years.

There are still excellent books coming out of commercial publishing, and authors who can fit the mold will continue to do well. But what about those of us who don’t fit the mold? The suits aren’t about taking chances. They’re about sticking to formulas that make money, and creativity be damned.

I recently read that the publishing industry is in trouble financially. I’m not surprised. The article went on to say that conventional publishing is facing competition from online publishing and the growing market for e-books. Again, I’m not surprised. This is the route I chose to take for my two most recent novels.

I left the New York scene a little over ten years ago, frustrated and burned out because I wasn’t allowed to do the kind of books I really wanted to do because, as my agent put it, “they weren’t glamorous.”

I knew I was in big trouble if I was only going to be able to sell books that involved designer duds and five star restaurants. I don’t know Donna Karan from Kmart. I’m a jeans and t-shirts girl. I always thought designers should put their labels on the outside of their garments–otherwise, it was pointless to spend all that money for an original. How would people know who designed it?

I guess wearing it inside out might help.

I remember the day my editor told me the publisher had spent $10,000. for the photography for my first novel’s cover. It was a dark background with a man’s hand and a woman’s hand and a diamond necklace. Beautiful, yes–but aren’t book covers supposed to say something about what’s inside?

In fact, my first four covers, lined up side by side, looked like DeBeers ads. And the publisher changed most of my titles. Their titles were knock-offs of Sidney Sheldon titles. Now, Sheldon was and is my favorite novelist–but I didn’t want to be a knock-off of anybody. When my agent informed me that in salvaging one of my original titles, another had to be sacrificed because the marketing guys had to get something out of the deal, I couldn’t believe it. Was this more about giving the S&M guys something to do that it was about putting out a successful book?

I’m no Dan Brown. They could put his books out in plain brown wrapper (and yes, that was intentional) with just his name scrawled on it in crayon, and it would still sell like snow cones in hell. The rest of us have to get the reader’s attention.

Now we do crazy things like blogging….

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