Supply and Demand of College Admissions and Publishing

by Cynthia Light Brown

Five people. One small hotel room. 4 colleges and 1,000 miles in 3.5 days. Joy, thy name is the college admission tour.

The three offspring (aka parasites) bickered over who had to sleep on the floor, drew straws, fussed some more, pulled covers and kicked and yanked and scrabbled and squabbled in furiously loud whispers and kept me awake until 1:00. The husband snored through it all. The 17 yo boy (aka Slob) left his smelly socks draped on chairs, beds, even the sink. The 11 yo girl got stomach aches, headaches, fainting spells—all about halfway through a college tour, which then miraculously disappeared when the tour was finished. The 15 yo girl (aka Snark) reminded me over and over of how they would soon all be off to college and out of my life never to return. By the end of the trip I replied, “Could we make “soon” be tonight?”

Colleges say they really want your child. If they really meant that, they would have information sessions on the weekend. They would hand you a cup of coffee to keep you awake during the information session where they tell you their college is unique because [insert any of 10 reasons that sound exactly like the last college]. They would hand you a bottle of water for the sweltering tour. They would have percent acceptance rates in the double digits.

But they don’t.

So the masses of unwashed hordes troupe from college to college trying to sort it all out with the dawning realization for the child that getting in will boil down to grades and luck and for the parent that if by some chance the offspring gets in you will have to pay about twice as much as you think you should be paying (this formula works whether or not you get financial aid) so maybe you’ll be just as happy if the offspring doesn’t get in after all.

Sound familiar? If publishers really wanted your manuscript, they would actually allow you to submit an unsolicited manuscript. And when you do, they would reply either way in less time than it takes a glacier to form (which in case you didn’t know, is a couple of decades in more temperate regions like Alaska and hundreds or thousands of years in Antarctica). They would thank you for the privilege of reading your amazing novel and pay you enough to live on.

But they don’t.

So the masses of writers submit and submit and submit with the dawning realization that getting published boils down to a lot of hard work and luck and even if you do get published you may end up on the midlist and never get published again.

None of which is anyone’s fault. Not the admissions officers, not the editors, not the high school seniors, not the writers. Too many people trying to get into too few slots.

We left New York City on a Saturday morning, drove to New Haven for our 4^th and last college, slogged through a campus tour (being on a weekend, it didn’t include an information session and according to the website wasn’t even a tour aimed at prospective students though there were LOTS of people and I guarantee you they were all prospective students) and drove home to Pittsburgh all in one day/night.

We had not originally planned to pack all that in one day, but the squabbling finally ended as we agreed on one thing: no way, no how were we spending another night in a hotel.

Whew.

I have only one real answer to all of the above. Gratitude that there are all kinds of great colleges with different admissions and costs, that there are so many great students, that I have a car to go traipsing about to different colleges, that I have a computer to write on, that there are so many wonderful books to read, that new options are opening up for publishing including electronic publishing, that so many editors find the time to take the care that they do on stories, that I have 3 beautiful children and a wonderful husband, an incredible writing group and bloggers, a great agent and editor, and that, mindful of the many people around the world who cannot say the same, my husband and I have a snug house with a room all to ourselves.

Of Filters, Risks, and Torrents

by Cynthia Light Brown

Susan (see post below) got me to thinking about filters. You can filter data in Excel, parents can filter out objectionable material on TVs and computers, your body filters in and out all sorts of things.

One of the oldest types of filtering is in water.

Water filtration has a couple of similarities with the quality filtration in traditional publishing. For the maximum—best—filtration, you have the following:

• It normally passes through the filter at a very slow speed. (There are two speeds in publishing: Slow, and VERY SLOOOOOOW.)
• It passes through several stages of filtration. (Can you say agent, acquiring editor, executive editor, marketing personnel, acquisition committee, copy editor?)
• You have to have good quality filters to get good quality filtration. (aka you get what you pay for, or a good editor is worth her weight in signed, first edition Harry Potter books.)
• Filtering can remove beneficial constituents (in water, stuff like fluoride; in books—read on.)

I fully believe that traditional publishing will still play a big role in how we choose our books. I love my physical books, plus I’m a traditional gal at heart.

But traditional publishing also filters OUT a lot of good stuff. If you’re a writer who’s been seriously writing for any length of time—even if you’re well published—you know what I’m talking about. I wrote a picture book a few years ago that I still love; it landed me an agent, an editor who loved it, and it went to acquisitions at a major publisher. The marketers on the committee just couldn’t quite picture the illustrations. The manuscript is now in a drawer, keeping company with lots of other manuscripts. How many authors have heard that the editor loves, loves, loves the story, but it’s not quite edgy enough or is in between middle grade and YA or is too literary or too quiet or is a little too close to another book on their list or is just too too too?

Please don’t think I harbor any ill feelings towards the industry because my story isn’t in full color in Barnes and Noble. They’re a business like any business and very good at what they do. But they respond to the market, and a big part of their decisions is about risk, not about quality. The risk of new authors, the risk of a book that doesn’t quite know which shelf it should be on, the risk of something that would have a following, but maybe not a big enough following. In other words, yes they filter out a lot-lot-lot of stuff based on quality, but they also filter out a lot of stuff based on other factors.

Here’s the thing: the risk for publishers is not fully aligned with the risk for authors, or even for readers. Partly aligned, yes, but not fully. And authors need to figure out where we differ.

If you’re a writer with a quirky book, or a book that needs to sit on an in-between shelf, or may have a limited following, then your book represents a high risk for publishers, but not for you.

And if you’re a reader, when traditional publishing filters out books for reasons other than quality, your risk of not finding a book you want is higher than it is in the e-publishing world.

Except for the fact that earthquakes cause tsunamis. E-publishing is at least a 9.0 on the Richter scale of upset in the publishing world, and we now have torrents of books (and yes, I mean torrents in both the flooding sense and the internet sites for downloading illegal books sense). So even though a reader might be able to find the perfect book in the e-world that wasn’t available in the traditional world, how do they find it?

Forgive me for continuing with the water metaphor, but I think what is needed is perhaps more channeling than filtering. Getting the right book to the right reader. And the more finely divided those channels can be, the better. Part of that can be a filter for quality—sorting out the real dreck—but even more it’s style, genre, sub-genre. Not just a “it’s high quality” but what about the book makes it great. Then, as a reader, I can decide if those criteria are important to me. Because things that are important to me may not be important to other people. That’s always been tough to figure out, and with the sheer number of books coming out now, it’s even more daunting. I have some thoughts on specifics, that I’ll post in Part 2, sometime in the next week.

Brave New E-Publishing

We sometimes like to think otherwise, but publishing is a business. That’s not a bad thing, or a good thing, it’s just a thing.

If you are trying to earn money through writing, then you’re a business (if you’re not trying to earn money, then you’re either a poet or possibly a children’s writer and you have my sympathies). I’ll leave it up to you whether you’re a good thing or a bad thing.

I’m in business. The hardest thing to do is to get and keep customers. You can pay other businesses to do it, or do it yourself, in-house. If you pay other businesses, they may be better at it than you are, but they’re not doing it out of charity for you. Let’s say you make widget-toys and you get Widgets-R-Us to sell them for you. If kids stop buying your widgets, the store is not going to keep selling your widgets because they think there’s a chance you’ll come up with a new best-selling widget, or because they think your widgets are good for kids. On the other hand, if you try to sell your widgets yourself in your own store, you’re going to have less time and $$ to make the widgets in the first place.

But here’s the thing: people aren’t going to widget stores as much anymore. So a bunch of them are closing. And Widgets-R-Us might go bankrupt.

Writers have one thing to decide. What’s the best way to connect with customers?

The answer might be many ways. Or one way now and another way later. Things are changing. Keep your eyes open. You could find yourself drowning in a mud puddle, or maybe…Singing in the Rain.