What do you do? Oh, a writer. Fantastic! Who’s your publisher? Who? Never heard of them. Well, so long buddy, I got other tables to wait on.
That was the old days. That happened when publishing companies used to reflect integrity. It was part of the American dream that talent would be recognized and transformed into profit. Publishers sifted through submissions to find those outstanding pieces of literature – those stellar works that were thought to be so magnificent and original that they just had to be shared with the world. The financial side was a gamble, there was no guarantee of profit, but the possibility of a bestseller was enough for a publisher to invest in its production.
That was the past. Today the industry is very different. Who gets published nowadays? Well, that depends. Very few writers get published by traditional publishers, because publishers can’t afford to take many risks.
The issue is of course that publishing companies are companies. Businesses. Anybody who’s ever taken a course or read a book on the basics of business administration will tell you that a business has one goal: profit. So they take a wide aim at their audience of readers to be sure to net as many as possible, in order to please their shareholders. This results in the publishing of the big name authors, and the destruction of any piece of writing that might have been brilliant enough to change peoples’ lives because it had too much of this, or not enough of that, or one character had to be this way, and another had to be that.
Who suffers? You, the author. And you, the reader. And unfortunately human progress as well. How can we have free and open communication necessary to sustain democracy if the only voices being heard rely on profit to influence important change? I’ll leave you to mull that one over on your own because it raises a cascade of greater questions I can’t broach here.
Solution: Take charge. Publish your own book if you think people will like it. Promote yourself, since no one else will, whether you’re published by the mainstream or independently. Write with the freedom you deserve. Are you interested yet? Contact us. We’ll do the work. We’ll get you published. And we’ll leave the imagination and creativity to you, because after all, that’s your job – to be creative. To be free.
Eliot Stier