A Personal Coronavirus Diary: The Book Publishing Tangle

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Yesterday I began what will be a week’s series on writing in the time of coronavirus. Go have a look at that if you’d like the full introduction. Today we’re going to look at the fascinating world of book publishing, and growing possibilities offered by technology.

Traditional Publishers or Self-Publishing?

It used to be the case that there were two tracks in publishing: proper, professional publication through a selective publisher or self-publication through a “vanity publisher.” The latter, as its name implies (or shouts derisively), was reserved for those who couldn’t find a regular publisher but wished to see their manuscript in bound form. It was once embarrassing. A disgrace.

Oh, and for absolutely no reason, I’ll mention that copies of my debut novel, The Puddle Variations, are still available.

Ahem, carrying on. Publishers have always performed a gatekeeping role; they receive thousands of manuscripts/pitches a year, and can only select a few. The reader presumes the ones they choose meet minimum standards, and that the product was professionally edited and produced.

The system was far from foolproof. Publishers will only take on books that have a plausible chance of making money, and they will also print the worst dreck if it has a big audience. That means small books with little commercial appeal never get a sniff, no matter how well they’re written. The gatekeeping role, performed by overwhelmingly white, middle-class people, has also filtered out giant majorities of BIPOC writers, trans writers—anyone the white editors thought wouldn’t appeal to readers like them, which they assumed were the normative reader. (This is part of that pervasive systemic racism that infects all corners of life.)

The genius of the internet has created new work-arounds, both in terms of publishing tech and, critically, market access. Now it’s possible to publish books without bothering a publisher. This has many advantages. That gatekeeping role creates a very long process of query letters, proposals, agents, and editors, and then once you’re squared away with a contract, you’re years from having a book on the market. Self-publishing can be done immediately, without any of that rigamarole. The author is responsible for editing and laying out the book, but the process of actually uploading it into one of the sites that distributes books is relatively easy and fast. Most allow you to do both digital and corporeal copies, and you can even get an ISBN if you wish. Books may not make it to Barnes and Noble, but Amazon is happy to sell them.

Self-publishing no longer carries a stigma, either. Some of the most celebrated names in our little world have dabbled in them, starting with Evan Rail. He capitalized on one of the interesting benefits of digital books: shorter manuscripts. Typically, anything less than around 40,000 words does not make a fat enough book to merit putting between covers. But in digital form, who cares?

Recently Andreas Krennmair published Vienna Lager, highlighting a second benefit of self-publishing. If the target audience is a small, specialized group, publishers usually pass. That means very good and/or important work is often left unwritten. Krennmair’s book is an excellent treatment of the cultural and brewing history of a revolutionary beer style and hugely entertaining for those with an interest in brewing history. (Mini review: buy it!, it’s full of fascinating, new information!) We would be poorer had he not written it. Of course, Ron Pattinson has bundled together his work in different compendiums and released them (valuable resources for the Beer Bible) in book form in much the same way.

And also just recently, Pete Brown decided to pursue a topic of interest on his own in Craft: An Argument. (Still reading it, so no final review, but of course everything Pete writes is entertaining and thoughtful, so it’s not a stretch to recommend it.)

Not All Books Make Their Authors Rich

I probably don’t have to mention this, but books are incredibly risky. I don’t have recent figures on hand, but the vast majority of publisher-published books do not earn back their advance (the amount they paid the author to write the book). Indeed, most books don’t even sell a thousand copies. I have published five books. Two have done well (The Beer Bible, The Beer Tasting Toolkit [I know, bizarre]), one is a slow-burner (The Secrets of Master Brewers), one is too soon to say (Widmer Way), and one was an absolute dud (Cider Made Simple). That is … actually not bad. I’m doing a bit better than average, and I work in a fairly small niche. My guess is that beer books in general do more poorly than nonfiction titles in other categories.

So with that preamble we proceed to…

The Great Breweries

I’m currently toying with a book. I’ve spoken to Kristi Switzer at Brewers Publications about it, but I’ve also considered self-publishing. The idea is pretty simple: an illustrated book about the world’s great breweries, organized by country. My shtick, careful readers will know, is that beer emerges from culture, and that the extant styles made today emerge from national tradition. We may think of styles as the framework to which breweries conform, but it’s the opposite: breweries make the beers that we then lump into styles. In the proposal I prepared for Kristi, I wrote, “The keepers of the tradition are the men and women working in breweries where these beers are made, and to the extent standards exist at all, they reside with those old breweries where the beers have been made for decades or centuries.” I continued:

The Great Breweries will take readers on virtual tours through the 28 breweries that define the types of beer they make. Each profile will feature an account of the history and heritage that characterize the brewery, descriptions of the physical environment, ingredients, and equipment, and a discussion of those processes unique to the brewery and beer type. The profiles will blend travel writing with ethnographies and technical aspects of beer-making, bringing alive the experience of visiting a brewery for those reading at home. Chapters will feature full-color photographs and color sidebars with information about the brewery.

So now we come to the question of what, if anything, I should do about this potential book. There is no obvious nor easy answer to this, because every choice involves the possibility that I do a huge amount of work that ends up earning very little back.

Before returning for a second edition of the Beer Bible, I pitched a book I was really excited about—a general nonfiction book telling the story of human civilization through the lens of beer. I spent a year off and on working with my agent to get the proposal together and write a sample chapter. I thought it kicked ass. My agent, himself a writer and literary magazine editor, thought it was a winner. Every publisher he contacted, however, wrote the same thing: it’s beautifully-written and evocative and we can’t sell it. (They were probably right—selling books is their job.) Now that lovely manuscript and sample chapter sit decaying on my hard drive.

So how should I push forward with The Great Breweries? There are cool opportunities out there. I could start a Kickstarter (Kristi’s idea) to gauge interest. I could use Amazon’s now-easy interface. It would mean no publishers acting as stern gatekeepers shaking their fingers at my idea. But it could also mean I write this book, which will take hundreds of hours to complete, and sell—as most books do—a few hundred copies. if Brewers Publications picked you the book, it would mean a small advance and possibly nothing on the back-end.

It’s not obvious what the right path forward should be. And, given the more limited opportunities thanks to the Coronavirus, it makes everything more risky. I can’t really afford to devote hundreds of hours to a project that nets very little money. (I can hear Patrick whispering “opportunity cost” as I consider the options.) And yet it’s not obvious where opportunity lies.

So, there we are. I have other book ideas, including one not about beer. The creative expression of thinking through the contours of a book and writing it are delicious to contemplate. They are also, in some very key ways, beside the point. If I’m going to keep doing this full-time, I have to select projects that will earn me money. It’s crass, and I hate it, but it’s the price of choosing do this as a job.