Saturday 10/21/23
Here's what you'll see authors post on social media: screenshots of news of their book deal as reported on Publishers Marketplace. The books always sound ridiculous, because they are. The way it works is someone with no talent writes something derivative of other books that also suck. Then, an agent pitches the book by the person with no talent as a combo of these other shitty books.
That's how this goes down. You need to have work that sucks, bores, and matches other work that sucks and bores. I mean, what would happen if someone wrote something original? Can't have that, can we? No. Very bad. The author has usually done nothing, and will never write anything of any note. That doesn't matter.
These reports always function the same way. "Pitched as a mix of blank and blank." I had a publisher of mine ask me what the recent comparables were for one of my books (meaning, what could we say it was like by other current authors?) I mean...come on. What do you want me to say? You want me to make up some absurd lie?
"Oh, it's like this book by this person, and that book by that person. Um, like if they had a baby."
Fuck the fuck right off with that.
This book deal detailed below was done because of the above suck, bore, match, cringe-inducing ridiculous factor--this is real; this isn't satire--and because the main character is going to "discover just how dangerous the world is for women."
Daring! So fresh! So exciting!
Here's how this works: there's before selling and after selling/sales. The latter is about the quality of the book. That is, someone thinks, "This is amazing, people can love this, they'll read it and fall for it and talk about it and share it." Another variant would be: "This is total genius, this is a masterpiece, this can do something in the world." Etc. After selling/sales is about the work. And no one in publishing gives a fuck about that. No one thinks in the way I just described. Should be the only way anyone thinks, pretty much, right? Not here.
What everyone cares about is what I call before selling. How many followers do you have? What color are you? How connected are you? Are you trans? Do you have a victim mentality? What is the flavor-trend of the moment--which may not exist by the time the book comes out, but whatever--that your book taps into as part of this gross, totally insincere, vapid bullshit we're doing like anyone really cares, let alone the author, agent, and publisher.
And it is for those reasons that deals are done. The before reasons, which are entirely about things other than the quality, utility, and value of the work.
Look at this garbage. It's so predictable. It's always something like this. Part of the reason is that no one now can write anything save this kind of shit. And then you have robot people who can't think any other way save that this is how to do it and how it has to be done because that's how the programming works. But no one wants it. Not really. It's laughable.
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