Pill the First:
World Fantasy Award winner Tim Powers has lost his contract with his publisher.
Pill the Second:
NYT columnist Ross Douthat is publishing his fantasy novel via Substack subscriptions.
"Why are these pills black?" you ask, you being someone who pays little attention to the esoteric sisterhood that is the traditional publishing world in 2024. Let me explain.
Tim Powers
Tim Powers is one of my literary heroes, and more to the point, has spent a lifetime selling a string of popular fantasy and alternate history novels. This man, more than any other living writer, has the career I wish I could have had. Born into a world of privilege, a world where talented but unseasoned writers could get mentored by wise editors at large publishing houses, he hit his stride early and cranked out some of the finest novels in speculative fiction.
Speaking as someone who didn't start writing until the decline of what you could call the Trad Pub model of nurturing new talent, I am sometimes tempted to envy Tim Powers.
Well, screw that; envy is a sin. Go read Powers, go now. If you're unfamiliar with him, check out The Anubis Gates, then proceed to Declare and then, oh, heck, maybe The Bible Repairman and Other Stories.
In the last 10 years, I've sensed a bit of a slowing down, a sense that Powers is maybe shifting into semi-retirement. I don't feel quite the same urgency to read whatever he's come out with latest, although I attribute that more to my mounting to-read pile. But we're talking about a man whose reputation is unshakeable.
Well. My faith in Powers secure place in the publishing pantheon was shattered when I heard the gossip go 'round at a writers conference: Tim Powers' latest novel didn't sell well, and his publisher ended his contract.
Yow. If even Tim Powers ...
Ross Douthat
Meanwhile ... a couple of years ago, NYT columnist Ross Douthat put out a call for beta readers for a fantasy novel he's been chiseling away on for much of his adult life. He released the first 50 pages and asked for advice on how to improve it--that was the explicit request. I think he was also publicizing the novel's existence to build an audience for the thing. "Oh, Ross, this novel is better than Tolkien! How can I give you money for it?" is, doubtless, one of Douthat's fantasies (and I know this because it is the fantasy of all writers).
Douthat also wanted to vent; because, it seems, Ross had pitched his novel to a number of major--and, what do I know, maybe a number of minor--publishers and received in response an unbroken stone wall of rejection. You got that right: Ross Douthat, NYT columnist, couldn't get his first novel published anywhere.
Yow. If even Ross Douthat ...
What the Heck is Happening Here?
You're thinking, just for completeness sake: maybe the novel was rejected because it ... possibly ... was bad? I can report, based on the 50 pages I saw, that badness was emphatically not Ross' problem. Yes, the development of a lucid, masterful journalistic voice does not guarantee competence in fiction. But, really, the excerpt I read was easily good enough to be published. The novel began with a prologue that was simply masterful. A page turner, really, with style and poetry and a Shakespearean sense of tragic inevitability. I'm not exaggerating. My sad little envious heart doesn't mind saying that because what followed was somewhat flawed. Hey, I'm just being honest: the subsequent chapter was to light on dramatic tension--the point of view character was a child with no goals--and the result was a big info dump.
But those flaws don't matter: they are completely fixable with the guidance of a wise editor. And had Ross Douthat pitched this novel 30 years ago, there's no way some publisher wouldn't pick it up. I mean, consider the built-in audience a NYT columnist has: Douthat could publish an annotated phone book and still there are thousands who would buy it. I would buy it.
This is the state of Trad Pub today. Once we lived in a Golden Age, if you showed talent, they'd nurture you and publish you and edit you and, hopefully, get you to where you had a faithful audience to justify (sort of) your existence financially. Then we reached the Dark Age where only authors with an audience pre-built got accepted; celebrity authors, basically. Now, we live in a post-apocalypse where publishers don't even care about making money. They have no loyalty to the Tim Powerses of the world, nor will they even publish the Ross Douthats with their guaranteed success.
If publishers don't care about making money, what do they care about?
Representation. That's what they care about. But that's a whole 'nuther discussion.