I won't go so far as to say that the New York City Mob that has controlled publishing in this country for almost 100 years hasn't been hurt by the explosion of print-per-order and indie publishing. I'm sure they have; we're rustling their livestock, the readers, and we're undercutting their profit margins like hell by giving away or almost giving away our work. In my own book's genre, nobody who wants to read vampire fiction need ever spend a dime on it again.
Okay, quality is another matter, but that's not the topic right now. The New York Mob with their armies of agents as button men are supposed to guarantee quality literature by all the hoops they make the author jump through before a single copy rolls off the press. It doesn't work, at least not any more, if it ever did. There is just as much pure tripe being published today as there ever was, most likely more. (Where is today's Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Robert Heinlein?) The Mob's litmus tests for admission into the charmed circle are now for the right connections, for political and personal orthodoxy and ideological conformity.
Stephen King is especially bad about that; he's not a bad writer when he'll just sit down and write about something or somebody other than himself as a thinly-disguised protagonist, and when he's secure enough so he doesn't feel the need to placate the political Moloch of our time through the burning of copious pinches of incense. Some of his books could easily be lightened by about one third by getting rid of the ritual genuflection to the Power, and be much the better for them. But I digress.
Anyway, the Big Five (who may be the Big Three or Big Two now; I haven't kept up with all the mergers and whatnot) are definitely still out there, and they've got the screws clamped down tight to keep out any interloper who doesn't have a Upper East Side agent.
Yesterday I had an attempt to get a "major" publication to simply take a look at Give Me The Night shot down, brusquely, rudely, contemptuously. The very idea that these giants among men might actually deign to read one single word I had written to see whether or not I might be worthy of admission into Elysium never came up, and was conspicuous by its absence.
It is clear: to Big Fivers and their remoras, self-published and non-NYC-approved authors are doodoo to be scraped off their shoes. This without reading a single word that such an author has written.
I'm not complaining, because it would be useless to do so. But I really think we need to build some kind of counter-balance or alternative network where actual talent has at least some part in the process and authors like me are not simply thrown in at the deep end to sink or swim, mostly sink.
I keep hearing a lot of talk about this very thing on my Facebook groups, but so far that's all it is, just the usual internet BS session. No one has been able to direct me to anything substantive yet.
End rave.
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