From HuffPost UK:
In 1761, a businessman opened shop in a modest address in London. Nobody noticed; after all, modest businesses open all the time. There’s no blue plaque on the site and most of us have never heard of him.
But we should. Because when Joseph Johnson – a publisher originally from Liverpool – opened his press for the first time, he was precipitating a publishing revolution whose echoes would sound down through the ages.
The late Enlightenment was a time that saw an unprecedented rise in literary output, most of it from what would now be considered small presses and home publishing. With the big-money and specialized industries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still to emerge, a publisher might also be printer, book-seller, distributor, advertiser, agent and many other things beside (Johnson also sold patent medicine as a sideline). His concern for authors is almost unheard of today. As scholar Leslie Chard explains, Johnson not only fed and often housed his authors, but “served as banker, postal clerk and packager, literary agent and editor, social chairman, and psychiatrist.”
It was this nurturing that saw some of the most important publications of the Enlightenment see their day. Johnson would go on to publish Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, as well as feminist economist Priscilla Wakefield and religious dissenters such as Joseph Priestley; he would have also published Thomas Paine’s manuscript of Rights of Man were it not for government intervention.
So a single publisher ended up helping to bring about feminism, secularism, Malthusian economics, and one of the most important political earthquakes in history. And yet he did it all from a modest series of addresses, on a modest income, with often modest returns. He did it, in a manner of speaking, because he took the time to care about his authors.
Link to the rest at HuffPost UK and thanks to Dave for the tip.
But seven years into a government that sees creativity as a loss to GDP,
Who says creativity is a GDP loss?
Oh, good grief. Twenty-first century. Internet. Amazon. Computer.
Won’t someone connect the dots?
“Publishing Still Matters – But Who’ll Pay For It?”
The writers, as they always have (unless they had a patron or three.)
The only thing is is that the internet now allows writers to skip some of the middlemen in reaching their readers.
Getting ‘paid’ for the effort can still be problematic, but it’s always been so.
Requiring an intermediary that takes 15% of your monies is so rude I can barely suppress a bit four-letter shout. It’s absolutely insulting. It’s one thing if a writer chooses their own IP lawyer or agent and is happy about it. But to REQUIRE it to even deign to look at your submission (even if it’s just a query letter with short sample) is basically saying, “We can’t be bothered to hire people to do that editorial work we’re so damn proud of, so you pay for it.”
There are a few exceptions. DAW is sorta-kinda wink-wink okay with agent-less (“unsolicited”) manuscripts. Maybe TOR is a distant second place, because one can usually attend a conference and pitch the editor there; if the editor wants to see the manuscript, then it is no longer unsolicited.
Honestly, it was hard to come up with two exceptions. They all pretty much require an agent; they hate dealing with authors directly. Instead of writing thousands of checks to authors, they write a few fat checks to established literary agencies and let the writers fight about money with their agents. The checks come months late, possibly with a little extra skimmed off the top, but at least they finally do arrive!
I once asked an agent who had taken an interest if she would agree to split payments.
FYI – if you want an agent to reject you instantly, that’s the line to use.
Baen. Publisher Toni Weisskopf has said, “I suppose you can have an agent when you work with us, but I’m not sure why you’d want to.”
Yes, Baen! Thank you. I was (foolishly) only thinking of Big New York publishers.
Also, Ed…haha. Wow. If that’s not a warning sign, then I don’t know what is.
Baen Books accepts unsolicited manuscripts.
Has anyone in this little thread ever submitted to Baen? What has the timeline of getting an answer back? Website says “9 to 12 Months” but I wondered if that was just to keep submitters from e-mailing them to death every week.
It’s been a while, since it was just for my first book, but it took less than six months to be rejected by Baen.
Small UK publisher in 1700s: I’ll nurture you. I just want solid writing and big ideas. You do all the hard work of writing it, and I’ll make sure people read it, because I am the publisher. I’m always here for moral support, and if you want to brainstorm ideas with me, I’m all ears. Let’s change the world together.
Big New York publishers 2010s: We nurture you by paying an advance and over-editing your manuscript and then sending it to a sensitivity reader before we shove it into a failed writer-turned-copyeditor’s face. If you don’t like it, we cancel the contract (which is for World English rights). Oh, and your advance is for $10,000, split up into three or four payments, minus the 15% agent fee that we forced you to incur before submitting to us.
And if your debut novel (sub-midlist) doesn’t sell 1,000 copies in its first month, you don’t get a second chance with us. Sorry. You should carefully consider what promotional efforts you’ll undertake, because we certainly won’t.
We can pay politicians deca (δέκα)-million dollar advances, but investing in a second book by a relatively unknown author might force us to make layoffs. Well, let’s go ahead and do that anyway.
P.S. Don’t write anything else until we’re through with you. We’re nurturing you well enough so that you don’t have to write crap for other publishers, so just shut up and be grateful for the deal you got. It’s possible to take us to court over this, but we know you won’t.
It could be worse: Your manuscript could be in the slushpile, unpublished, like thousands of others.
Translation: A government that’s unwilling or unable to subsidize Hipster sermons, doubtless of the most predictable and tedious sort, is one that is opposed to creativity.
Well, good luck to them. For all I know there’s actually audience for such things. I’ll show myself out before I slide further into grumpiness and state something I’ll otherwise regret.
I am totally in favor of government money to the arts, as long as it only focused on Post-Apocalyptic Zombie fiction.
Oh, and captioned photos of kitties.
Note that in the UK, Indie = non-BPH tradpub.
Thus the underlying assumption that without tradpub nothing gets to market. They sound a wee bit out of touch with the wider world.