Aliceshortcake: Another little Jacqueline Susann-related gem from the High Hill Press blog, posted earlier this year:
HHP: It's all new territory, and publishing is going through a pioneer stage that we haven't seen since the 50's.
Back when I started working in the industry, I got to meet some of the real oldtimers who pioneered the midcentury publishing boom. These were the guys who built the mass-market sales and distribution systems that put wire racks of paperbacks into groceries, drugstores, stationers, five-and-dimes, bus terminals, corner newsstands, and convenience stores all over the United States.
In the mid-50s, there were 600-700 bookstores in the U.S., and most of them were located in big cities, university towns, and New England. People forget that now. Many large areas had no bookstores. Department stores might or might not have a small area set aside for books. If it hadn't been for mass-market paperbacks, towns like the one where I grew up would have had no book retailers.
The sales and distribution guys who built that system, and the pioneering editors who put books into them, knew the technicalities of their business inside and out. They had to; it was a weirdly ingenious jury-rigged system that piggybacked on the magazine distribution system. A spinner rack of paperbacks in a grocery store wasn't competing with other reading material; it was competing for square feet of aisle space with manufacturers' displays of cookies or laundry detergent or canned peas. It took a great deal of specialized expertise to operate in that market.
The little storefront bookstore chains came along in the 70s and 80s, followed by big-box stores like Barnes & Noble, online bookselling, audio books, and e-books. Along the way we've become habitual book buyers and readers, with broad tastes and a sophisticated familiarity with genres and packaging. Forget what you've heard about declining literacy; it's BS. People are reading more, reading more widely, and keeping the reading habit later in life than they ever did before. And because there's been that marketplace, and the immensely complex mechanisms that furnish it with a constant supply of new books, there are many more titles getting published, and many more authors getting paid for writing them.
None of those developments were inevitable. All of them took hard work.
Louella Turner is one of the inheritors of that vast feat of literary and commercial engineering. She doesn't care about it, and she isn't interested in learning more. She has no idea how impossible her little publishing operation would have been forty years ago. She just takes the whole thing for granted, complains that High Hill Press isn't better known, and spreads stupid misleading fairy tales about how books get sold.
HHP is a vanity publishing operation, but that vanity is its publisher's, not her authors'.
HHP: I always tell my audience at a conference or workshop
This woman teaches workshops? Shoot me now.
HHP: that we're back to the days of Jacqueline Susann,
was published in 1966. It had nothing to do with the 1950s.
HHP: where an author has to fill the trunk of his car and hit the road in order to sell books.
That's not how any author sold their books. It's certainly not how Jacqueline Susann did it. (See my previous posts.)
HHP: Jacqueline sold Valley of the Dolls to truck drivers and nuns
The actual connection between truckers and Jacqueline Susann: Once the paperback edition had come out, she'd go out to the loading docks of the big distributors' warehouses at three or four in the morning, and schmooze and hand out coffee and doughnuts to the guys who loaded paperbacks onto the trucks. No one had ever done that before. The guys loading the trucks appreciated the attention. This increased the chances that cartons of her books would make it onto the truck, get racked at the other end, and sell.
I have no idea how the nuns got added to the story.
HHP: as she drove from the east coast to the west.
This is pure folklore: The Epic Coast-to-Coast Book-Pushing Journey of Jacqueline Susann! ... which never happened.
Considering how much of Susann's self-promotion consisted of television appearances, I have to wonder what Ms. Turner imagines she was doing in the interior of the continent.
HHP: She was a genius at marketing
She was good at self-promotion. Her husband was better. The full marketing and promotion apparatus of the conventional publishing industry and the mainstream media was also helping to sell her. It is a complete and utter misrepresentation of the actual events to depict Jacqueline Susann as a brave solitary author traveling those lonely blue highways. Few authors have ever been as cozy with the national media, or benefited so much from her publishers' promotion and support.
HHP: and it slowly pushed her book to the top of the best seller list.
Slowly, my ass. That book went up like a rocket.
HHP: She did it all without the initial help of New York.
Okay, that does it.
I wanted to believe that Louella Turner and her husband were just misinformed, but that last statement is outside the range of honest error. I'm sorry. That's a lie. From the moment Jacqueline Susann sold the rights to publish
Valley of the Dolls, she and her book had the full support and backing of New York publishing at every step along the way.
Aliceshortcake: Good God - Ms Turner is telling this absurd story at workshops? And the sad thing is that most novice writers will probably take it at face value...because it comes from the CEO of a publishing company.
There are novice writers out there right now buying books about how you can infallibly make your book a bestseller, written by self-appointed experts who have never made a single commercial sale, much less had a bestseller. Other novice writers are running up huge student loan debts in order to attend university-level creative writing programs where the
department chair has never sold a book. Believing a word Ms. Turner says may be a bad idea, but in terms of pure abstract stupidity it's still some distance from the end of the scale.
Aliceshortcake: Mind you, I'm rather taken with the image of nuns standing at the side of the road reading Valley of the Dolls as Ms Susann's Bookmobile sets off on the next leg of its journey.
Oooh! I want there to be urban legends about the Phantom Hitchhiker who vanishes from the back seat of your car before you reach her supposed destination, only instead of leaving her sweater on your back seat, she sells you a copy of
Valley of the Dolls. Afterward, you discover it was the ghost of Jacqueline Susann, the eternal self-promoting author, doomed to forever wander the dark fields of the republic.
Aliceshortcake: Elsewhere Ms Turner bemoans the fact that maybe the talented young writers of today "can't take the pressures and heartache of trying to sell a novel in New York City":
HHP: But it is sad to think that because we're small and maybe not as well-known as St. Martin's Press, we might not get a query from the next Flannery O'Connor because she doesn't know we exist. And instead of persisting, this new Flannery might quit writing and take up knitting instead.
Is this the same woman who was saying that if you're not prepared to hit the road and devote yourself to hopeless book promotion, you're not ready to be published? Because selling a novel to NYC publishers is a lot easier. What you mostly have to do is write the sort of book your fellow human beings want to buy and read.
I have real trouble imagining writers who find out only after selling their books to SMP that they could have sold them to High Hill Press instead, and become so distraught over this discovery that they quit writing and take up knitting instead. In my experience, people either like knitting or they don't. Selling a book to SMP won't change that.
Further Turneralia on those awful NYC publishers. Apparently, they:
HHP: for the most part, abandoned great stories in exchange for the flashy unauthorized tell all, the political bloviating disguised as literature, every new diet craze to come down the pike, and big name authors who sometimes appear to be doing nothing more than fulfilling a contract...
Check. I've seen this sort of rhetoric before. There's only one real answer:
I'm sorry your book got rejected.
HHP: Don’t expect your publisher to give you free books.
Malarkey. High Hill Press may not give its authors free copies, but we do it all the time. It's right there in the contract. And if you want to push for more free copies in your next contract, you'll probably get those too.
I'm still wondering whether Ms. Turner's been run through the mill at Publish America.
HHP: Especially with a small press.
If she wants to cheap out on author copies, it's her call. Leave us out of it.
HHP: Even the New York publishing houses make the author purchase any books that they might want to sell on their own.
That's not the same thing as free author copies. That's unfairly competing with your publisher.
HHP: And it’s common knowledge, that in most cases, that’s the only way you’re going to sell.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
We put a lot of effort into selling our books. We're good at it, too. Our authors don't have to go out and peddle their own books. They can stay at home and write, and still rack up sales far in excess of HHP's.
What Ms. Turner is actually saying is that if you publish with HHP, they won't lift a finger to help you sell your books. Only she doesn't want to own it, so she's saying all publishers do that.
They don't.
WHAT? Does Ms Turner seriously believe that, even if you're published by one of the big NY houses, the only way you can sell books is by purchasing them from the publisher at a discount and re-selling them?