Gregory Frost Takes on the Recession
Getting Published in the Current Financial Climate
So, this recession. Is it still a viable aspiration for unknown genre writers to want to get published?
Well, I have no real idea. It might turn out to be a great time for unknown genre writers to break in because they have no track record, whereas people who’ve been publishing during the current Dark Ages will have a lousy track record and the suits will point at the unhappy sales figures (because that’s what nutless monkeys look at) and shit-can them.
So the unknown writer will have a golden opportunity to step into the breach for a smaller advance…at least until their numbers sour. That’s all assuming there are any mighty publishing towers still standing when the dust settles. I think more small presses will emerge. Many of them will likely die out in short order, a few will use a good business model, like Small Beer Press, and endure while also publishing extraordinary fiction.
The Kindle may indeed make a huge difference in the next decade. There are experimental books—60 page blanks that feel and act like paper but fill with 60 pages of print at a time—but they’re not going to be in your bookstore next week, and initially they won’t be cheap.
The model for the book business likely has to change, too. I hope the small independent bookstores make a resurgence, and people stop buying their books from the craptastic megachains, and start investing in the local infrastructure, ’cause I think local infrastructures are about the only thing that are likely to save us in the near future.
What about the short form? Every few years the rumour goes around that there is no market for short fiction anthologies, but they keep on being published. Then again, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror just got binned…
There’s a market, it just may not be a market with a giant sell-through any longer. Anthologies still sell, although rarely do they sell incredibly, and most, I think, have at least a couple of big names in them to get the audience interested -- you need your Neil Gaiman or Stephen King in order to green-light such a project in the first place anymore.
The “best-of” book was a big anthology, hardcover, and right now from what I’m hearing, authors are being told by publishers that the hardcover they were promised is going to be a trade paperback, and, oh, that trade paperback we promised you? Well, it’s coming out as mass market instead. Oh, and also, write shorter books from now on.
They’re cutting costs wherever they can, which is understandable. So maybe someone decided the world didn’t need to have all those stories yoked together anymore. I really don’t know. (See “nutless monkeys” above.) Of more concern to me is that magazines are fading away. There may not be any best-of anthologies pretty soon because there won’t be any viable markets for short stories to begin with.
It’s weird -- I’ve taught at Clarion a number of times, and really the focus in those six weeks is on stories. We’re teaching people to write short stories and yet God knows where we think they’re going to sell their short stories. The market for those is evaporating and the traditional model of “sell a few stories, get some attention, then write a novel” is likewise about ready to be scrapped, if it hasn’t been already.
What are you currently working on?
Something I haven’t done before, a supernatural mystery. I love mysteries, and they are my pleasure reading: Donald Westlake, Christopher Brookmyre, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, etc., etc. So I’ve felt compelled to try my hand with them, but again because I’m wired for weird, mine has supernatural elements in it. There’s another Shadowbridge book in the wings, too, but I think it’ll take everybody clapping for Tinkerbell to get Del Rey to jump on board in this current climate.
In the Gregory Frost Explains Writer's Block the author talks about writer's block and who he would like to have at a dinner party.
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