Luck vs. Perseverance
Publishing. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. The more I learn about the world of publishing, the more I’m inclined to think the requirements for actually getting your work published is down solely to luck.
You’d think, as a reputable university keen to give its writers the best kick-start in life, that Brunel University would have done a little better when it sought a guest speaker for it’s “Creative Writing and the Creative Industries” module. You’d have thought that they might have recruited an author with plenty of experience and things to say on the subject of publishing and the perils therein. You’d have thought even that they might have at the very least selected an author who had actually gone out there and published his or her own work on the merits of their achievements, on the grounds of their skill with the pen (or is that word processor?).
You’d certainly have thought that.
As it went however, I don’t think Brunel could have picked a worse speaker for their publishing presentation.
Now I don’t for one moment want to belittle the female author in question, nor indeed do I want to undermine her achievements – being unpublished myself, I am in no way situated to be able to criticize anyone in this regard. My criticism is more, I feel, levelled at the industry itself, and the requirements placed on it by the market and the capitalist system. The female speaker in question did little to challenge my long-held view that publishing is down almost solely to luck.
In her mid-forties, the speaker admitted to her audience right from the start that up to receiving her publishing contract she hadn’t really written any substantial pieces of work other than the odd short story, as her life to date had been spent in the main, raising her family and working for her father’s publishing firm. Fair enough then, I thought, as I listened intently – experience isn’t necessarily everything. Maybe you’re just naturally gifted. I listened on…
Apparently, just randomly it seems, the speaker one day decided to apply to a publisher (note here, a publisher, and not a literary agency) with a hastily drafted (she admitted herself, rather unprofessional) approach, offering her services to write a children’s book on a famous individual for a series of children’s historical fiction books published by the firm. That’s it. Just one, single, unprofessional, random approach, with no writing credentials, no major experience other than working for her father’s publishing house, and no major submission other than a letter offering her services.
Needless to say, she got offered the contract for the book.
You can probably imagine my reaction as I sat and listened incredulously to this tale. I’ve been writing on and off pretty much all my life, and for the last six years I’ve been writing pretty much solidly. And yet, for all my efforts, it seems a random nobody with no experience and no credentials can somehow get offered a contract directly from a publisher to write a children’s book for them.
HOW? I ask. Just how on earth did her (in her words) “unprofessional”, hastily drafted approach letter get her a publishing contract without having even written anything?
In all honesty, I’m still asking myself the very same question. It seems unfair really, given just how many talented, devoted writers there are out there, seeking publication for their life’s work.
As if I wasn’t incredulous enough already as to the luck involved in the female speaker’s publishing contract, there came at the end, the one final kick in the teeth to sap the remainder of my already low morale.
She went to university with the two owners of the publishing house.
I really wonder sometimes, if there’s any hope for any of us!