Vanity Fair manages to keep me hanging on to my subscription with a few noteworthy articles
per issue, interspersed with (to me) unappealing articles about glitz and glam and
actors and actresses. One of the magazine’s strengths, from my standpoint, is a
strong advertising base that allows it to put a lot of resources into articles and topics I do care about. Of special interest to writers is the October issue, which
contains a long, interesting piece about the story behind Chad Harbach’s
breakthrough novel The Art of Fielding.
Here’s the magazine’s
capsule description of the article by Keith Gessen:
“There was the author,
Chad Harbach, who had spent a decade on a novel his friends thought he’d never
finish. There was the agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, who recognized its power. There
was the editor, Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch, who won it in a high-stakes
auction. With the story of one book …. Keith Gessen examines the state of the
trouble, confused, and ever unpredictable world of U.S. book publishing in the
age of Barnes & Noble, Amazon and e-readers.”
The article gives a useful
overview of the changes in agenting and book-editing. Here’s something for
writers to chew on:
“Publishers,” the article
says, “used to employ readers to deal with the submissions; that function has
been taken over by agents. But the agents, too, cannot keep up. Parris-Lamb
says he gets about 70 queries and submission per week. He reads all the cover
letters, but it would be impossible to read all the submissions, many of which
are whole books. ‘Honestly,’ he says, ‘I judge writers on how they write
queries. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer.’ And if not, then not.”
And I was stopped, too, by
this little factoid: For all of Barnes & Noble’s 700-plus stores, Gessen
writes, there is exactly one “literary fiction” buyer, who can make or break a
book. One.
-- Ron Kovach, senior
editor, The Writer