No Market For That Sort Of Thing

Read over Daniel Menaker's series of rejection letters that he's listed at the Huffington Post, and you'll find that market forecasting is what's behind acquisitions.

The man is well known in publishing circles. He has friends in high places. Yet his memoirs did not garner the enthusiasm from the editors that he apparently expected.

Clearly, Mr. Menaker thought his recollections of life lived among the literati of New York City would be a blockbuster. He was editor in chief of The New Yorker, worked at Random House....what more does a writer need to do?

Write something that the editors of the big publishing houses think readers will buy. They're thinking that readers have no interest in Pauline Kael or the behind-the-scenes look at a highly influential magazine.

Could it be that editors realize that the typical book buyer doesn't give a rat's arse about a toney rag? That what passes for intriguing gossip in New York City isn't going to attract more than a bored shrug in Omaha, Nebraska?

Rejections No. 2, No. 4,  No. 5 and No. 7 say as much, in a polite collection of phrases. Too small an audience, dear author. Your writing is sublime, your prose soaring, but your story isn't interesting to enough people to make it worthwhile.

What is a writer to do, so? Literary agents tell you to write from the heart, write what you love. If, by some miracle, an editor at a publishing house needs that story or plot line, then you're in. If they don't, you're rejected.

It should come as no surprise, then, that authors are turning to e-book publishing in such numbers, with a couple of UK literary agents not far behind. 

What the editors seek is their best guess as to what will sell, and they're often wrong. Declining book sales suggest as much.

Although they do get it right often enough. They're still in business, after all.

Did they get it right about Daniel Menaker's recollections of a life in publishing? Unless someone publishes his memoirs, or he does it himself, we'll never know.