More on publishing and "okaysellers"

Regarding last week's post on publishing's relationship to "okaysellers," Tor Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden adds, "What Teresa was trying to get at, and she's absolutely right, is that while book publishing may be greatly driven by our need for bestsellers, in the same way that many American policies are "driven by" our national need for easy access to petroleum, we don't in fact spend every second of every day wandering around in a frenzy obsessing about bestsellers, any more than everyone in America spends all their time invading Middle Eastern countries or grovelling at the gas pump. When the Wall Street Journal writes that "publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest" and says that "when a book doesn't sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant," they're grossly misrepresenting how most of book publishing works. We may be driven by a need to have some books that "bestsell," but our daily life is far from dominated by work on bestsellers to the exclusion of all else. To the contrary, smart publishers know that publishing is more like gardening than it's like factory-farming; if you want giant successes, you'd better have a whole lot of little experiments going all at the same time. We need bestsellers. But we don't spend all of our time on them, and we don't sweep non-bestselling books (or their authors) off to the glue factory. We need all the other books as well. Because you never know."

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