An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  For the mass of laborers in the literary vineyards, even getting a book accepted for publication, even having it produced by a reputable house, even having it released to the nation’s bookstores and newsstands, does not guarantee that it will make a cent, beyond the advance monies paid, for the scrivener who labored to set down those words.

  The reality of book distribution and promotion and display is a doleful one. (For purposes of this essay only, I will restrict myself to the vagaries of paperback publishing, saving for another time the horrors of hardcover realities.)

  At the moment I write this, which is today, according to the statistical bible of the publishing industry, LITERARY MARKET PLACE, there are approximately forty major paperback houses. This is a wholly inaccurate figure, of course. I’ve probably missed a batch. I plucked out only those names I recognized as releasing titles on a regular basis. But each of those firms issues titles under a myriad of imprints. And those are just the mass-market houses. Additionally, there are all the specialized presses, the university presses, the trade edition publishers and the hardcover houses with trade or mass-market editions of titles they’ve already marketed in hardcover.

  Of the dozen-to-forty major paperback houses, the release schedule includes between six and fifteen titles each month. The estimate (conservative, I wager) of total paperback titles flooding the racks each month is between 125 and 175. Two hundred seems to be a not-impossible figure. Newsstands get new shipments of titles twice a week.

  And here’s the staggering reality: the average shelf-life of an average paperback is between 5 days and two weeks.

  What I’m relaying here is the simple fact that if my latest book gets to your nearest 7-Eleven spinner rack today, by this time next week…it’s gone. And that doesn’t even mean it was sold. What it means is that it had front-cover display for about five days, and then when the new batch of books came in it was put at the back of the pocket (where most people won’t look for it, because they think all five of the pb’s in that pocket are the same), and then—if I’m lucky and the clerk at the 7-Eleven knows my name—it gets shunted down to the back of a pocket at the base of the spinner rack (where no one looks because they don’t want to bend over that far), and ten days to two weeks later it is pulled and is “stripped” for return credit. (Stripping is the procedure whereby the front cover is ripped off and returned, and the book itself is supposed to be pulped. In fact, this frequently does not happen. In fact, the stripped books are bootlegged to a second hand shop or some other knockoff joint. But that’s yet another bit of illegal tomfoolery that circumvents the intention to make it easy for the pb retailer so s/he doesn’t have to ship back an entire load of postage-heavy product.)

  The system works in variants of what I’ve delineated above. B. Dalton and Waldenbooks and independently-owned bookstores have their methods; drug stores, magazine shops, newsstands have theirs. But it all works along those lines.

  So given the foregoing, which books get the push from the publisher? Well, Bantam Books will put massive promotional efforts behind something like PRINCESS DAISY because they shelled out 3.2 million dollars to the hardcover publisher, Crown, for the paperback rights. They will not, obviously, get quite so frenetic about promoting a mystery or science fiction or western novel picked up for $3000, or an original book commissioned “in-house” for an advance of even $10,000. When you sink or swim on the sales of a single title, you attach the life preserver of publicity and tv commercials to the Big One and, while it may be chill to put it this way, the rest of the list can dog-paddle for survival.

  Yet until recently, virtually every book contract contained the following phrase: “Publisher will expend best efforts in marketing the title.”

  “Best efforts” is a catchy phrase. While a poet or an academic might find that a Spartan circumlocution, those of us whose brains don’t dribble out of our ears would take it to mean best efforts. And that purely presents itself, say in relation to PRINCESS DAISY, as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of newspaper, magazine, television and radio ads, huge dump-bins at point-of-purchase, die-cut book covers in three or four assorted styles, wide-ranging promotional tour for the author to babble on tv talk shows…the whole range and depth of possible ways to get you, the potential buyer, to rush off for a copy. That, by me, is best efforts. Because if a dreary item like that Judith Krantz novel can draw down such loving attention from a publisher, then it’s obvious the publisher is capable of such efforts; ergo, that becomes the definition of “best efforts” for that publisher.

  But as we can see from the fact that anything much below the fiduciary-interest level of a Krantz or Robbins or Rogers book gets, at best, cursory promotion (gone in 5 days to two weeks), we are dealing here with hyperbole. Best efforts if you have written a book for which the paperback house went neck-deep into debt; but dog-paddle if they paid for the book out of petty cash.

  But what if a writer who squoze his guts out writing a book he cared about deeply, who sold it to a paperback house believing he had at least a shot at promotional parity, found the 5 days / two weeks reality unbearable? What if such a writer, seeing his labors stripped and pulped before they had a chance to reach what he (in his arrogance) believed was a reading public hungering for his creation, decided to fight back? What if that writer, so naive in the ways of the slicker world, did not understand that it’s a shell game with the odds hung against his ever making a dollar in royalties, and he decided to take on the Status Quo? What then?

  Well, gang, since you’re here with me on the other side of the barbed wire, in here with the weeds and the mesquite that looked like green grass from over there outside…since I’ve got you over here and have explained the terra incognita you needed to understand before I could whip on you the saga of Bill Starr…I guess you will forgive me if I break this construct in half and come back next week to demonstrate that if you care enough, if you get mad enough, you can whup ass on City Hall. Or, in this case, Pinnacle Books.

  Return, if you will, next week at this exact location, here in the weed-choked pastures of publishing, for the story of Bill Starr and a book called CHANCE FORTUNE.

  You say you’ve never heard of that book?

  How interesting.

  You’ll hear about it next time. I promise you.

  INSTALLMENT 25: 19 APRIL 82

  Letters reprinted with permission from the L.A. Weekly

  The Saga of Bill Starr, Part II

  Continuing the story of Bill Starr and how he took on one of the lesser publishing monoliths, Pinnacle Books, and beat them (pretty much); thereby setting a fascinating precedent for every writer whose literary labors have not been merchandised with an eye to providing fair access to the marketplace.

  If you need your memory refreshed anent the background data that suffused the last installment, go find the copy you squirreled away in expectation of this week’s denouement. Hurry up, now. I’ll wait.

  (While they’re out of the room, for those of you who were clever enough to retain all that good stuff from last week, here is some bio data on Bill Starr. Just don’t look guilty when they come back, or they’ll think we’ve been talking about them behind their backs, the poor devils.

  (Bill Starr is one year shy of being fifty years old. He was born in 1933 in Phoenix, Arizona. Served three years in the Marine Corps during World War 2.3: Korea. Honorable discharge. College at Cal State Long Beach, an Education Major. Having prepared himself for a teaching career, he discovered it was the last thing he wanted to spend his life doing. The sale of a short story to Caper, a men’s magazine, right around that time, led him into the delusion that he could support himself and a family through freelance writing. Over the years he’s been able to do just that, miraculously, with an occasional gig in the construction trades.

  (A pair of marriages that didn’t work out—a familiar occupational hazard to those of us who make their living behind a freelance typewriter—and a now-grown son who has a steady scam as a c
omputer programmer. What Starr calls a “delayed-adolescent Hemingway / Kerouac period of knocking around the world” after his first marriage went pfut! resulted in some interesting experiences such as an unsuccessful Caribbean treasure hunt and training a small cadre of anti-Castro Cuban freedom fighters (Starr’s terminology) who decided, after the Bay of Pigs dustup, that they’d rather go for the Yankee Dollar as businessmen.

  (Over the years Starr has written and sold between 350-400 stories, articles, poems, op-eds, greeting card verse, and five books. The most recent of the five was CHANCE FORTUNE, an historical novel about early Los Angeles, and well, hello, welcome back to the column. No, nothing happened while you were out of the room, honest to God. I don’t know why those other readers have such silly grins on their kissers.)

  I was just saying CHANCE FORTUNE was Bill Starr’s fifth novel. He sold it through the Los Angeles editorial offices of a New York-based paperback publisher name of Pinnacle Books in December of 1979. It was to be approximately 75,000 words in length, and he had a deadline of June 1st, 1980. He was paid a total of $5500 as advance, in two installments: $2750 on signing of the contract, and the same on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript. His royalty for books sold was to be 8% of the retail price per copy on the first 150,000 copies, and 10% for every copy sold thereafter.

  Bear that $5500 in mind. It is pretty close to the kind of money that was being paid for 60,000 word original paperback novels in 1955 when I broke into the field. But this was 1980 we’re talking about, and a loaf of bread ain’t 13¢ no more, as it was in 1955. Also bear in mind what I told you last time about Judith Krantz getting 3.2 million for the paperback rights to that sterling example of classic literature, PRINCESS DAISY. It has everything to do with what happened to Bill Starr.

  CHANCE FORTUNE was published in September of 1981. The initial print run was 65,000 copies. It has not been back to press. Say bye-bye to that mythical 10% of the retail price ($2.75) for every copy over 150,000 sold. In fact, with the marketplace as I described it last week, say bye-bye to making even a dollar more than the $5500 Pinnacle paid as an advance.

  Now you’d think Starr, a freelancer for many years, would have long-since scuppered the sort of silly amateur naiveté that non-writers wallow in when they accept the myth that anyone who gets a book published proceeds therefrom to a life of indolence and frequent sojourns to the Côte d’Azur. But Bill Starr is one of those charming old-style Americans who actually believes a lot of silly mythology (most of it right-wing reactionary bullshit, but I won’t get into that here; after all, I’m trying to paint this man as a hero, even if we’re at opposite extremes of the political spectrum; I mention this only in aid of your understanding that Starr and I have no buddy system in operation). And one of the myths Bill Starr believes is that if you write a book well, and you get it out there, and if you push it a little, it’ll reach an audience that will enjoy reading it and who need to learn what is within its pages.

  The word for Bill Starr is naive. But that ain’t a felony.

  Nonetheless, as an editor at Pinnacle Books told me, “No one tells a guy to quit his job when he writes a book. I swear I’m going to have all our contracts headed up with the words don’t quit your job. Even though it isn’t my job as an editor to educate a writer to the realities of publishing, as a past official of the Women’s National Book Association I’ve tried to get this kind of information out to writers and the general public.”

  But Bill Starr didn’t quit a job to write CHANCE FORTUNE. Writing is his job, and given the lamentable condition of cheap hustle and talk-show persiflage that has become part of the life of writers who ought to be at home working, but who have to pitch their wares in public like fishmongers, his job was selling the book. So, naive sweetie that he is, Bill Starr sent a copy of the book to Ronald Reagan. Because it was about old Los Angeles, because he thought Reagan would like to read it, because he voted for Reagan and admired him and…miracles never cease: Ronald and Nancy Reagan wrote back the following:

  “Dear Mr. Starr: Thank you so much for sending us an autographed copy of CHANCE FORTUNE, your novel about early Los Angeles.

  “Being avid readers and fans of California history, we were much impressed by your storytelling skill and the fascinating things we learned about our state. It is easy to visualize this fine book as a highly entertaining motion picture. We almost wish we were still acting, so we could audition for roles in it.

  “Sincerely, Nancy and Ronald Reagan.”

  Pause a moment, gentle readers.

  Do you have any idea what that kind of endorsement is worth, properly publicized? Well, let me give you an idea.

  When Franklin D. Roosevelt let it be known that his favorite leisure time reading was detective novels, it caused the boom in ’tec fiction and was, in large part, responsible for the Golden Age of mystery writing that produced Hammett, Chandler, John Stephen Strange, John D. MacDonald and the Mystery Writers of America. When FDR legitimatized thrillers, the publishing industry leaped for the genre.

  In the mid-Fifties an obscure series of spy thrillers that had been kicking around for years, whose author was virtually unknown, was idly mentioned by John F. Kennedy as his off-hours reading passion. The books suddenly came back into print, were bought for films, and became the biggest moneymaking continuing series of bonus-budget motion pictures in the history of cinema. The books were about an English spy named James Bond, and the author—who became a millionaire as a direct result of that offhand endorsement by the President of the United States—was Ian Fleming.

  The letter of January 5th, 1982 from the President of the United States and his wife, extolling the virtues of Bill Starr’s book, contained a quality and potency of potential publicity that $100,000 worth of advertising could not have bought.

  Sweetly naive Bill Starr had innocently struck the mother lode, and his future was assured. Right?

  Wrong.

  Because Pinnacle Books, in one of the most astonishingly cavalier gaffes in recent publishing history, chose to do virtually nothing with it. Though the West Coast Editor for Pinnacle, Carole Garland, sent out a few minor press releases (which were universally ignored in the tidal wave of PR releases received each week by newspapers like the L.A. Times, the Herald-Examiner and the very paper in which this column appears, the L.A. Weekly, none of which even bothered to review Starr’s book), the publisher chose not to expend a farthing to promote the golden egg their Starr had laid at their feet.

  Even more appalling was the knowledge Starr received when he rushed to Pinnacle with the Reagans’ letter, that the book was no longer available. Three months after publication, CHANCE FORTUNE could not be purchased in your neighborhood 7-Eleven or Crown Books or B. Dalton outlet. It was gone as if it had never existed. Bill Starr, whose felony was that he trusted and believed that he had sold his work to a publisher who gave a damn about promoting and selling his creative efforts, got one helluva dose of Reality.

  A soul-crushing Reality that even those of us who live very comfortably from our writing have learned to live with:

  Most publishers—not just Pinnacle—don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. And they always have a hundred thousand dumb reasons to rationalize why it all goes sour. Most of which blame the writer. The miracle is that any books ever get noticed. As one former Pinnacle executive told me, after publication of the first part of this Starr chamber proceeding, “It’s a shame you focus this problem on Pinnacle, instead of Bantam or Dell or one of the other larger paperback houses, because they’re all the same. Pinnacle’s an easy target because they’re just more openly stupid about their errors, they’re just less graceful than the others. But it’s the same throughout the industry. The #1 and sometimes the #2 book on the list get all the advertising and promotion, budget and attention; and the rest of the titles published that month—between 12 and 15 at Pinnacle, for instance—are simply printed and distributed. They’re like baby turtles abandoned out on the desert, left to find their
way to the sea.”

  In the face of this corrosive Reality, lesser human beings such as you and I would either capitulate and continue to labor six months for $5500, knowing we had learned our lesson under the lash of commercial callousness—or give up entirely the dream that being a writer has any greater nobility of purpose than, say, hustling used cars on late night television. Either way, it would have been the death of the spirit.

  But here’s the swell part.

  Sweet, naive Bill Starr, even in the face of an institutional ineptitude that could stun a mountain, fought back. I have spoken in these pages many times about the power each of us contains to move the world, power enough to immobilize a tsunami. Too often I’ve spoken of it in the abstract, like some est seminar mantra, full of hollow passion, untranslatable in real-time emergencies. This time I speak of it in the specific.

  Bill Starr took Pinnacle to court.

  Oh, not the way Judith Krantz or Irving Wallace, with vast financial resources behind them, would have taken their publishers to court: hundred and fifty dollar an hour attorneys jousting on a darkling plain of interrogatories, motions, depositions, casebook law and inevitable Darrowinian declamations in Federal District Court. No, Bill Starr made only $5500 for six months’ work, and so he sweetly and naively did what none of us would have had the simple tenacious wit to do: he sued Pinnacle Books in Small Claims Court.

  California law limits damages in Small Claims to $1500, but not only does one defend oneself, thereby saving the cost of an attorney, the plaintiff can sue anyone in, say, a great corporation. From the President, Chairman of the Board or Controller on down. And they have to appear in person, in the three-piece skin themselves, unrepresented by counsel…or lose on a default.