A Few Thoughts On The Business Of Publishing

He scoffs at the publishing industry.

The more I educate myself on the whole publishing process, the more I think I'm becoming a little disillusioned by it and that makes me sad. When I was a kid, I loved reading books (more so than I do now). I devoured them and could go through five a week easy. Now, I go through about two a month.  I follow buzz because I figure that's where the good books are and the lesson I learned was that a book never lives up to the hype. Now, as a child and a teen I had the utmost respect for authors. I thought, wow...this is the coolest thing ever. I'm enjoying this story so much and what must it be like to have this kind of influence. I quite frankly believed that it might be the coolest thing in the world.


Young Adult Loot Pinata

So then we have books like "I Am Number Four". I never read it, but I saw the movie and it was terribad. I know Michael Bay's movies so I shouldn't have been surprised but you know, the material for the movie comes from the book. Unlike some people, I'm a firm believer that unless the director is an absolute moron, then there's got to be some blame that falls to the author (the originator of the source material). So I looked into this. It's penned by an author called Pittacus Lore and I discovered it was the pseudonym for James Frey. He's the same guy that penned "A Million Little Pieces"...the memoir that Oprah endorsed and later became infuriated when she discovered it was fiction.  A media storm followed and James Frey became a pariah in the publishing world. His agent left him saying essentially that she could never represent a person once the trust had been ruined. So how did James Frey get paid millions of dollars for "I Am Number Four"? Answer: he remains well connected and the publishing business is all about money. They apparently don't care how bad you stink or that Oprah hates your guts. They seemed to have enough faith in James Frey that he had a "formula" for making money that it was like nothing ever happened. So here is what James "Pittacus Lore" Frey did.

He went to Columbia University with a book contract (read about it here) and hired the starving MFA students there (and from other reknowned universities) and created a writing factory. "I Am Number Four" is the result.  Here are some choice words from that article:

"Frey believed that Harry Potter and the Twilight series had awakened a ravenous market of readers and were leaving a substantial gap in their wake. He wanted to be the one to fill it. There had already been wizards, vampires, and werewolves. Aliens, Frey predicted, would be next." 

So yeah...take the Twilight script cross out the vampires, insert aliens, make them hot teenagers that show plenty of skin and bam you have a bestseller?  I would be laughing...only... I guess the answer is yes you can do exactly this.  Like WTF? Seriously?

Here are more details from that article:

"Frey handed him a one-page write-up of the concept, and Hughes developed the rest of the outlined narrative. Frey’s idea was a series called “The Lorien Legacies,” about nine Loric aliens who were chased from their home planet by evil Mogadorians and are living on Earth in the guise of teenagers. Through early 2009, Hughes told me, he delivered three drafts of the first book, I Am Number Four, to Frey, who revised them and polished the final version. Hughes wrote the novel without any compensation and signed a contract, without consulting a lawyer, that specified that he would receive 30 percent of all revenue that came from the project. The book would be published under a pseudonym, and the contract stipulated that Hughes would not be allowed to speak publicly about the project or confirm his attachment to it. There was a $250,000 penalty Frey could invoke if Hughes violated his confidentiality terms."

Well all I gotta say is that people bought it in droves and the book has been sold in 44 countries and translated into 21 languages. When asked about memoirs, Frey responded of the genre that it was "bunk" and "bullshit".  Nice eh?  When asked about truth, James Frey said "It doesn't exist." When asked about Oprah he said, "I should never have fucking apologized." How about self-editing?  He responds, "A trap for young inexperienced writers." I would laugh at him and hold tight to the ideals that I've learned but the industry is rewarding this guy with millions of dollars in his pocket. If you didn't catch that I'm going to spell it out for you:

He's getting paid millions of dollars.

As writers of fiction, is what we do a joke? From where I stand it almost seems like, yes, it is. Readers embraced the first books out of his young adult fiction factory so well that honestly, it looks like a huge "loot pinata" that James Frey is pounding at with a bat, using formulaic plots, crossing out vampires and inserting aliens and whammo...Harper Collins book contract and movie deal produced by Spielberg (and it bears repeating that the movie sucked and that they moved on the movie rights before the book was even published).



Paramount cannot afford to
make this movie apparently.

Meanwhile, the remake of Dune has been canned because the studio needed 100 million to get it off the ground, Max Brooks' excellent zombie apocalypse novel World War Z got scrapped (again for budget) even after star/producer Brad Pitt and director Marc Forster already agreed to make it a PG-13 picture, and Universal dropped Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness because he wouldn't budge from an R-rating for that $150 million dollar epic.  Why the hell are studios quibbling over these numbers? Films were being made 20 years ago that cost this much. But there's more than enough money to throw at every Young Adult novel that gets pushed out. I'm so confused. Whatever happened to plot? What happened to originality? Is writing now just a formula and as long as you fit into the formula you get paid? Are readers just sheep chewing on grass and if you're somehow smart enough to find the formula then bam, you get a book deal?  


Is this what we are when we read?

So I look to restore some faith in the book market and I discover this. The book is completely blank and it has sold out its first print run, hitting no. 744 on Amazon's list ahead of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  Like f*cking really?!? I can understand gag gifts but this is absurd.

Anyway, this post is not directed at any of you fine writers to whom I visit often on your blogs. On the contrary, your honesty and willingness to share your struggles with me is the only thing that keeps the spark of my youth (where I used to think being a writer was awesome) from completely going out. Rather, it's a disillusionment with an industry that I perhaps had on a pedestal. Now, maybe...not so much. I know all of you out there are working extremely hard. I just think that what James Frey has done is a slap in the face to every author trying to make it out there and seems to be endorsed by an industry that really could give a sh*t to be honest. Making money is all that matters and there appears to be a formula (which I don't know) on how to do exactly that. I'm sure Faulkner, Twain, Hemmingway, and Austen to name a few are rolling over in their graves at the question, "Where has all the integrity gone?" The trailer for the H.P. Lovecraft movie is a fake but done so well I included it to give you an idea of what the movie may have been like if it hadn't been canned.