Publishing Didn't Used To Be Better

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It’s easy to see publishing as in decline. People read less (this is true according to studies as well as anecdotally amongst my friends, two of whom, both English PhDs, recently told me they don’t read anymore. “It’s my livelihood!” I tell them, urging them to try harder). There was a slew of layoffs and imprint closings over the past few weeks over the Big Five world. The temporary lift in sales during the pandemic is now sliding back down the axis. Dan Sinykin’s New York Times op-ed about Cormac McCarthy’s career—writing in obscurity for decades before having a hit—has led to many laments to how it used to be better.

In his latest of his always excellent newsletters,

SHuSH, by Kenneth Whyte

walks through some of the ways the above lines of thinking are false. As he writes of McCarthy and changes in publishing (apologies for the long block quote but this newsletter is just better than any paraphrase I might provide):

McCarthy didn’t come up the Master of Fine Arts route because there wasn’t a single MFA program in America when he was born in 1933 and they were exceedingly rare when he enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1951. By the time he won his National Book Award, there were at least 100 MFAs in the US training roughly 4,000 writers a year. Collectively, these programs are a massive runway from which to launch today’s Cormac McCarthys.

Finding an agent would have been difficult for McCarthy in the 1950s because few of them existed in the US and most were concerned with the international rights trade and books in translation as opposed to introducing new talent to domestic publishers. Today there are hundreds of agencies and thousands of agents in the US whose livelihood depends upon finding and developing new talent.

It may be that the big publishing houses have dwindling patience with mid-list authors, but the US now has thousands of small to mid-sized independent publishers who help to sustain the careers of promising talent. Relatively few of these existed when McCarthy started out. Like the MFA programs and the literary agents, the independents launch and sustain careers. They seldom pay well, but Random House paid McCarthy like he didn’t sell until he started to sell. He was indigent the first half of his career.

And McCarthy was a white male, which gave him an advantage over countless other writers.

As I’ve written about previously, many of our now-canonical authors made very little from their writing during their lifetimes. Ralph Ellison endlessly struggled. Nathaneal West kept getting screwed. Go back further and it’s more of the same: Jane Austen had to pay her publisher (basically self-publishing), as did Phylis Wheatley. James Fenimore Cooper made much more money self-publishing than he did once he had a traditional publishing contract. American authors couldn’t even get contracts by virtue of them not being British (whose books were royalty-free) for many decades after the country was founded. Malcolm X’s widow was screwed out of royalties, even after Malcom and Alex Haley had to keep begging their publisher for more money during the writing of the book.

Nor were publishing houses filled with genteel men of letters whose only agenda was cultivating geniuses. There have been a lot of paeans to Robert Gottlieb, editor of Toni Morrison and many others, but Gottlieb is certainly not above criticism. (Can you milkshake duck a deceased editor?). Grove Press gets the young literary boys all aflutter, but they were strikebreakers and sexists: the women employees staged a sit-in to protest conditions. People like to extol Toni Morrison’s work as an editor at Random House—the first Black editor ever when she was hired in 1967—but there were other reasons she quit in addition to a desire to write full time. Not only was publishing an old boy’s club, it is practically the reason the phrase “old boy’s club” was coined.

(While looking for a quote from Morrison about disliking her work at Random House I remember once reading, I stumbled upon this interview with her about Home.)

BOLLEN: The book starts out in Seattle. To be honest, I guess I always think of segregation and race problems as a North-versus-South divide. I never really thought of the discrimination in the Pacific Northwest.

MORRISON: My editor questioned that, too. I did my research. Boeing owned all of that property that’s mentioned in the book. There were documents that said, “No Hebraic, Asiatic, Afric, whatever, can rent or buy. They can’t live here unless they work as domestics.” My editor said, “I didn’t know that. We Northerners think of that as always being in the South.” I said, “What do you mean, ‘We Northerners?’ I’m a Northerner.” He said, “Well, I guess I mean, ‘We white Northerners.’” Because there is custom—not law, but custom. And then my editor said something about the main character being black, and I said, “How do you know he’s black?” He said, “I just know.” I said, “How? ’Cause I never said it. I never wrote it. I only describe what’s going on. You can’t go in this bathroom…”)

Last year, I went through Harold Bloom’s American Literary Canon to see how those he deemed the greatest achieved success. Now of course this is just one canon, but with only 40 people discussed it provided a decent data set. Here’s what I came up with (instead of final count I estimate, as I haven’t completed this research):

Most came from wealth and/or had elite education*
Many had a social world of influential friends**
Few could be said to have succeeded mainly on ”hustle” or “merit” ***
(Only one, I think—Toni Morrison—was a mother)

*Ralph Waldo Emerson
*Nathaniel Hawthorne
***Edgar Allan Poe
*Henry David Thoreau
***Walt Whitman
***Herman Melville
*Emily Dickinson
***Mark Twain
*Henry James
*Edith Wharton
***Theodore Dreiser
***Willa Cather
*Robert Frost
*Wallace Stevens
*William Carlos Williams
*Marianne Moore
*T. S. Eliot
*Eugene O’Neill
*Katherine Anne Porter
***Zora Neale Hurston
*F. Scott Fitzgerald
*William Faulkner
*Vladimir Nabokov
*Hart Crane
*Ernest Hemingway
***Nathanael West
Eudora Welty
*Elizabeth Bishop
Tennessee Williams
***Ralph Ellison
Carson McCullers
***James Baldwin
Flannery O’Connor
*James Merrill
*Ursula K. Le Guin
**Toni Morrison
Philip Roth
Cormac McCarthy
Don DeLillo
*Thomas Pynchon

I could go on—and I am, in my drafts folder, as I keep plugging away on my book on the history of American publishing. But the tl;dr:

—Conglomerate publishing is America is not in a great place, either because of pay inequity, diversity, profit-mongering, and lack of imagination. Major publishing, however, is much, much, less blatantly sexist and racist than it was in the 1950s (or whenever), just as most of America could be said to be the same. And overall it offers more opportunities than ever before.

—There are far, far, far more options for authors to have their books published today than there were at any time in the past. Self-publishing has made gatekeepers an option rather than a necessity, and offers writers the freedom so many desire. There are far, far, far more small presses, university presses, and non-Big Five presses for authors seeking a different experience than the Big Five.

—“Authors made more money in the past!” is faulty logic. Maybe a few, disproportionally privileged, did. But most made less, and even more never received any access to traditional publishing due to discrimination and the industry’s reliance on networking.

What upsets me most about this line of thinking, which I do see picking up steam these days (“it used to be better”) is not that it misreads history so much that it is fundamentally conservative. The past was no place for most of the best writers of today to succeed.

Imagining a new publishing ecosystem is a more hopeful and radical task. Every so often efforts to “disrupt” publishing show up, and while it is easy, and often appropriate, to roll one’s eyes at these tech boy experiments, at least they are forward looking. But there are more forward-looking ideas to be thought of, ideas steeped neither in nostalgia nor bad politics. Let us think up, and work on, those.