A is for Attitude, P is for Publishing

In my time at Beaufort, I’ve become increasingly tuned into just how important an author’s attitude is toward the success of a book. While it may seem obvious that a good attitude is beneficial to success in any endeavor, I’ve never really thought of writers that way. If anything, the opposite seemed true. Popular culture taught me the best writers were degenerate, alcoholic Bukowskis or shrewish, reclusive Salingers, who had no desire or need to please anyone. College taught me about degrees of distance, that proper literary study requires the observance of theoretical boundaries that eliminate authors, or treat them as shrouded abstractions, irrelevant to the analysis of the text they produced. My imagination told me that publishers would not really care how an author behaved, as long as his or her writing was good enough to sell books.

Yet months spent observing how a publisher functions has illuminated the ways in which a bad attitude can do a disservice to authors themselves, the publishers who believe in them, and the sizes of their prospective readerships. The authors with the best attitudes are the ones who take a proactive approach to their book’s success. They take the initiative to aggressively market, including self-organized book tours with signings and readings. There are authors who expect their books to become best-sellers with little to no effort on their part, and they are limiting their book’s potential. Furthermore, a default positive attitude can reap unexpected benefits in many aspects of life, and publishing is again no different. It’s much easier for publishers to go the extra mile for somebody who is kind and pleasant.

And despite what I learned in my English classes, I feel it’s impossible to fully distance ourselves from an author. Try as we may to be objective, any knowledge about an author affects us, even if it’s only subconsciously. For instance, even though I adore Bret Easton Ellis’s writing, I know many people feel alienated by his polarizing public condemnations of the likes of David Foster Wallace and Alice Munro, and therefore don’t take him as seriously. Or there’s Tao Lin—I was a fan of his poetry, so I went to a reading of his novel Taipei a few months ago. When it came to the Q&A portion of the evening, he gave terse answers with little care or thought to them. He came across as flippant and disdainful, and it made me lose a lot of respect for him. Even if he does not really care for doing readings, and answering the accompanying (sometimes inane) questions from the audience, making no effort to mask these sentiments is just downright foolish. These people came out of their way to see him, and they are the ones buying his books. While I still see merit in reading his books because he’s an incredibly talented writer, there are many books by great writers I have not read yet. That reading singlehandedly made Tao Lin less of a priority for me. Compare him to somebody like Neil Gaiman, who makes a noticeable effort to reach out to his fans on social media platforms, and is generally just an incredibly nice guy. Back when Turntable.fm was still in business, Gaiman ran Neilhimself’s House of Poetry, a digital room where he and other users would play recordings of any poems they wanted. When I would take my turn at the decks, he would praise my selections, even though he’s a very busy celebrity author, and I was just an anonymous internet stranger. When it comes down to it, people are spoiled for choice when deciding what to read, and it’s much easier to sell books if your attitude makes it easy for people to respect you.

– Beauchamp Bagenal